^{_{NOTE. This piece is the first of a self-reflection series by Pedro Rebelo, exploring his words, his connections, and how he sees the natural world.}}

****

"Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost" (Oscar Wilde). May we keep repeating the topics of nature and love, so they’re never lost. Nature is durable, if not eternal, but its creations are nothing but fleeting. Nature gives the poison and the cure for us to use as we please, and the price of that freedom is responsibility, and eventual consequence. The cures that nature gifts us, there’s the key to all doors.

_{^{SELF-REFLECTION, WORDS ON: LOVE}}

Love doesn’t seek to fulfil the gaps inside of us. Love finds us only when we are whole and someone else’s fullness comes to overflow us. It’s not a matter of sufficiency, but of abundance, it’s not a matter of salvation, but of damnation.

When my heart is beating uncontrollably, I surrender, and look up at the sky. The heart punches the top of my throat, I choke on myself, heart rises, I fall. The time comes when the heart gets stuck in the throat, stifles my breathing: it will either get out into the world or kill me, and that’s when love becomes a matter of life or death.

Nothing kills faster than a caged heart, so the only thing to be done is to set it free. The heart slowly spreads its wings and wakes the spirit from a deep trance. Then, suddenly, when it bursts out of my mouth, there’s nothing I can do but watch it fly.

You let me inside your secret world, and I paint it with colours that I didn’t know existed before I met you. I see you as one sees a painting in the flesh for the first time. I watch the texture of your paint rising in the canvas, scratched by a brush, a proof of the impossible: behind the divinity of the artwork, there was an artist, and behind your enchantment, there you are, made of the same remains of dead stars as I am.

You lead me into the wooden cottage inside the forest of your soul. I was lost in between the pine trees, the trunks so tall they reached heaven, and the leaves so golden in sunlight that it looked like they were blending themselves with the blond hair from angels of up above. As I reach for the door of your home, however, I freeze, struck by insurmountable fear.

Our souls only want what they fear, because they know that fear is their compass. Inside of what we fear is hidden what we need the most: if we fear darkness, we need light, if we fear loneliness, we need silence, and if I fear you, I need you. Any soul fears love because only the people who we love the most are the only ones capable of truly hurting us. There is no love without fear, love without fear is love without consequence.

What is the consequence of love, then?

It is to learn that a ripe fruit is always close to rotting, so you should taste it while you can. Even beauty, or especially beauty, dies. However, if our death, or the death of things we love, is inevitable, we’ll always have the power to choose how we are going to die. If in the process of living life we are each getting closer to death, living is essentially to decide how we’re dying.

It’s during life that we can beat death, not after it. Alive we can die, and in death some still live, immortality is not for those who are unable to die, but for those who triumphed over death during their lifetime. To defeat death is to defeat stagnation, to not only find meaning, but to live by it. You’ll find then that life is so full of power. It infuses passion in everything that it touches, and when life touches you, you never go back to being the same.

Time is knitting our lives together with the tissues of our hearts. We’ll run out of fabric someday, and then we’ll learn that we’ll never be able to save each other with our love, but with what is the true matter of salvation, friendship.

I tease myself with the anxiety of the unknown. That’s one affair me and fear share. When no one’s looking, we are together in our secret pact. What fear gives me is that I show it everything I want, and in return, it shows me everything I need. What I give fear is that everything I love scares me.

I’m frightened of you.