When our old ways of living no longer nourish our heart, we can do one of two things: either remain love-starved, or change the way we live. Chaos is often the prelude to great transformations. 

Spring by Katarina Silva

They say nature mercilessly injects desire into the spring season, and plays with our hearts like a cat bats around a defenseless, little field mouse before devouring it. Walk with me through the flowery meadows, if you dare. How could you resist their fragrance? But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This is the most dangerous time of the year. When the yearnings in human hearts reach their peak, and the whole world is wooing us to make love to it.

My incurably romantic heart is way too easily enchanted by springtime! The hot pink azaleas around my home are beginning to blossom. Their bright colors and the first wisps of warm air caressing my face arouse amorous feelings in me.

Barefoot strolls through the meadows fill my head with dreams of picnics, stretching out on soft blankets, blue skies above and juicy finger foods spread out before me; the kinds you slowly slip into a lover’s mouth. But today I walked alone with my fantasies to the mocking mating calls of feathered friends, my love unquenched.

Spring is the time of year every landscape is colorfully painted with the broad brush of temptation.

We are instinctively called to indulge in beauty, in luxurious vistas, in fruits that drip with nectar and rising temperatures that invite us to peel off those heavy layers of winter clothing, and let soft clouds of bright yellow pollen decorate our bare skin. Inhaling the mischief of this most fertile of all seasons, we long to run naked under the sun, and become little instruments in Cupid’s orchestra.

Ah! Love! It never really happens to us the way we think it will. The way we imagined it when we were little, and dreamed up all those pretty, sparkly pictures about what it would be like to fall in love. When one grows up, and understands that there is no perfect, fairy-tale-sequence of events or outcomes scheduled for our heart, one sadly realizes that finding a compatible, loving partner in this world can be one of the most challenging tasks our heart will ever meet. In fact, it’s often brutal. And most likely accompanied by a series of losses and disappointments that end up being much longer than a pigeon’s libido! (Yes, pigeons can go at it all day long!).

Heartache by Katarina Silva

So, for many longing hearts, the spring season -in which nature becomes gluttonous for coupling- only accentuates aloneness.  

And the desire to satisfy amorous hunger can burn so intensely that it annihilates all reason, as it dictates to some that death would be better than living a love-less life. It’s no wonder that suicides peak during the spring! Who would have thought? And even more so on full moons, like tonight.

Yes, this lovely spring season more people on our planet will tragically take their own lives than at any other time of year. For, spring is the season when longing hearts put an end to their own beating at a rate of more than one per every forty seconds! Yikes! This is a painful testament to all the hungry hearts in the world. Sometimes it almost feels like an epidemic. So many people are hungry for love.

Throughout history, in times of famine, regard for all laws jumps out the window so that people can be fed. Values shift and priorities are reorganized. An unshakable will to survive forces one to seek out food in places it never considered before: hidden places, unlikely places, even forbidden places. People will do anything to eat.

The heart will act in similar ways when deprived. Its hunger for love will turn us into passionate rebels, creative iconoclasts, and conscious breakers of any boundaries we perceive as standing in the way of love. When the heart hungers, social structures become inconsequential and cultural mores obsolete. For our reckless heart tells us that nothing is worth preserving unless it satisfies love’s appetite. And the reckless path it treads runs from death to infidelity: another kind of death.

Blossom by Katarina Silva

Because the universe arranged for destruction and creation to flow in cycles, we unconsciously kill parts of ourselves, so that the other more essential parts can live.

Sometimes we create chaos, as impetus to connect with deeper calm.

Sometimes rebel hearts will deconstruct rigid conventions, to explore what potential for growth exists outside their perimeters.

The amorous anarchy that erupts in the spring reflects the rising infidelity rates that also explode this season.

In light of the achy-hearted suicide victims, some might interpret the infidelities as a move toward self-preservation, instead of annihilation. It’s ironic, really, as infidelity is always accessorized with chaos. But maybe our heart needs to create chaos before it can be nourished, just like the kill of a hungry predator before the feed. There will be pain and blood, no doubt. But sometimes these things remind us that life is too short for compromises. So we sink our teeth in, and rip at our own being. We secretly want to get torn apart, so that we may blossom.

 Yes, we want things to get messy, so we can discover alternative realities of who we are and what we can create in love.

We want to break the safety of everything we once knew as love, to open ourselves up to everything love has yet to reveal to us. Most often than not this means taking a chance. Allowing our self to be seduced by high-stake risks. So what does it mean when we flirt with risky behavior in love? That we are deviants in need of remorse, out to break social fabrics without regard for anyone else but ourselves? Or that we are responding to a greater call for reform, for revolution, for new ways of living and loving that begin with breaking a mold?

Breaking molds is risky. Risks are connected to primal forces of creation and destruction, in which life values are inevitably weighed.

Risks beg the question: What is most important to me in life? What can I not live without? At a subconscious level, when we risk losing something, (a relationship, financial security, reputation, social status, etc) it is because we either feel it is already lost to us, or we want to understand how important it is to our existence, in relation to what we are risking it for. Love tips the scale every time.

When we find love in ‘forbidden’ places, as with infidelity, it challenges our very existence in relation to our significant other, in relation to our lover and in relation to our views of love. Perhaps we have forbidden ourselves from feeling deserving of love? Perhaps we feel love only exists in places that are off limits to us? Hungry hearts explore such forbidden territory to find answers.

When we are indecisive over where our highest value lies, we unconsciously create chaos in our lives in order to find it. Sometimes it takes the risk of infidelity to find oneself and feed one’s heart. And the springtime is the season most of us are doing this searching.

The Dance by Katarina Silva

Spring is wild and untamed. Everything in nature seems to be frolicking frivolously or fighting ferociously.

Animals will battle until death for the most desirable mates, as human hearts wrestle to find theirs. The battle is in the chaos. The chaos we create in our lives is our own subconscious mind tugging the rug out from under us, so we will be forced to assume new footing in how we approach life.

When our old way of living no longer nourishes our hearts, we can do one of two things: either remain love-starved, or change the way we live. Change? Oh no! Chaos is often the prelude to great transformations.

Chaos forces us to change our life in all the ways that terrify us most. When the enormity of the changes we know we need to make, scare us into paralysis, it’s often through creating chaos for ourselves that we are pushed into action. Its dynamic energy reconnects us with feeling alive again, like a field of blossoming flowers, or a rainbow: nature’s calls into life.

Action is synonymous with life. Springtime explodes with action unlike any other season.

Spring is fertile with the ever-changing movements of life. The choreography never stops, and excitedly beckons our participation. Life is never stagnant. Neither is love. If it’s not growing, it’s shrinking. Everything grows in the spring! It’s natural that this growth entices us. If we find our hearts flirting back with the amorous energy that impregnates the spring season, we may be ready to take that risk. We may be hungrier for love than we realize.

Prophetic Rays by Katarina Silva

 The one most pronounced driving force behind all risks is love.

Human hearts are permanently programmed to risk anything for love. We cannot live without love! The flow of giving and receiving love is so intrinsic to our very nature, that when it is obstructed we sometimes feel as if we will die. In this context infidelity is all about existentialism. It’s a path that inevitably forces us to examine our lives, our values, and the contents of our hearts. And most people don’t realize they are on it, until the chaos erupts all around them. But remember, there is intelligence in this chaos, for it points us in the direction of our own achy heart.

So, if you find yourself feeling alone this spring, as Valentine’s Day approaches (in or outside of a relationship), and you feel as if the longings in your heart are about to devour you, just tune into the natural chaos of the season, and see where it takes you.

You might just find that in the apparently random flight-patterns of honeybees, the wild mating dances of birds, and the savage pulsating of your own heart, there is a hidden, cosmic intelligence that screams:

“Live for Love!”

Because if you don’t it may just mean the slow extermination of our species. At least, this is what the spring season would like us to believe! Tread cautiously, my friend. Or not. But whatever you do, never let your heart starve.

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IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION UPON READER’S REQUEST:

In no way does this article attempt to undermine the unmatched value in honest, intimate partnering within a committed relationship. Mutually devoting such energy into a romantic, or spousal relationship nourishes the love between the two parties, continuously cultivating the healthy practice of conscious communications, thereby reducing the risk for such chaos to erupt in the form of infidelity, which has its costs. Love thrives in relationships that engage a person’s whole being: emotional, physical, psychological, sexual and spiritual. If you are feeling deprived in one of these areas in your relationship, opening up to your partner about it will set you on the less painful track toward determining if the relationship can become a lasting one. If not, an open, mutually agreed upon, graceful dissolution is always less hurtful than having a relationship end because of infidelity. But for those of you already experiencing the chaos that comes with infidelity, I hope my article can help you make greater sense of it. ~Thank you to Harleigh Quinn for bringing my attention to responsible publishing~