we live in an eros recession.

there is no imaginative force more powerful than eros. the scenarios we imagine are the last things we think about at night and the first thing we think about in the morning. being attracted to other people is life-affirming and helps us imagine better possibilities. it gives us the virile energy to dance and discover and let live.

we've commodified the sensuality out of our lives - in our food, which is made fast and casual. in our clothes, which are worn for the image over the feeling. in our relationships with the land, which is made exploitative over connective.

true eros requires slow building, requires boredom, and yin energy. it is the most renewable source of energy in the world. it is intangible, but its gravity is deeply felt. it is a property of life, the basis of it. it is a transcendent force which cannot be measured or defined, only expressed.

But more than anything else, conquering your shame really does make your life feel like art. Each experience feels precious, adds up, and feels valuable emotionally, because you’re no longer trying to bend yourself into a shape that will impress or please or delight others. Instead, you get to impress and please and delight yourself, without apology, without hesitation, every day. You don’t have to become someone special. You just have be yourself: impossibly deluded, deeply uncertain, and gloriously alive.

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be, The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don't recognise inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame," the quote continued, closing with: "Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness - Heidi Priebe