Tension, Love & Death
Tension, Love & Death. All inevitable aspects of our collective human experience. All aspects of our lives that Western culture has placed in the shadows so we can all embrace “happiness and bypassing” to a degree that we ignore the truth.
What if in removing these elements that create a web of afflictive emotions, Western culture removed our ability to feel deeply, to love as a verb and to embrace death as the beautiful transition that it represents?
Wisdom traditions, particularly those of the East, embrace Tension, Love & Death as necessary parts of our journey on this plane of existence. Afflictive emotions and how we handle them are the fuel that makes lasting beauty possible.
Deep art– art that moves people to action and moves a society towards change– doesn’t happen because the artist is comfortable, happy and without want. Powerful art comes from the tension of desire, heartbreak, violence, rage and sorrow and is the artist’s attempt to avoid resignation and despair. Such art forms do not and CAN NOT rise in complacency and comfort.
Powerful art lives at the intersections of the very afflictive emotions we are taught at a young age to ignore, suppress and bypass.
Why? Well, the reasons are many and in some instances, genuine. Our loved ones and elders wished to protect us from the violence and turmoil of the generations that came before us. Protection spawned from love. And we all need that type of protection from the violence of the world at various times throughout our lives.
On a societal scale, the bypassing that is culturally taught as the “norm” and the suppression of Tension, Love & Death serve the very evils our elders sought to protect us from.
If we do not feel rage at the actions of ICE agents against our communities, we will simply close our eyes as our neighbors are kidnapped, beaten and killed.
If we do not feel a deep love for people we are not married to, of blood relation or in some way bound– if we can not find love for those who are strangers, we will not stand to protect their lives with our own when the monsters rise.
If we do not witness and hold the death of our loved ones and elders as the beautiful transition point that it is, if we keep our loves ones hidden in hospitals and filled with the false hope of “you’ll be just fine in a few days” knowing the end is calculated in hours, not days, we are denying them and ourselves the excruciating yet beautiful releasing of the soul from this physical form as it travels to its next journey.
If we do not allow divine tension to exist in our relationships, we may miss the depth of shared human experience entirely.
To connect on the soul level with another human is a rare and powerful experience and one that we are not taught to seek or are even aware is possible. Ancient traditions held protocols and containers designed to equip humans to connect with other humans on an energetic level that transcended the material and reached into the astral. A level that many wellness gurus appropriate in an attempt to sell people a reality that they’ll never glimpse from the container of consumption.
I am grateful to have studied under lineage holders of multiple wisdom traditions that equipped me to understand, embrace and work with Tension, Love & Death. Classical Tantra, specifically non dual Shiva Tantra with some Vamachara sprinkles on top is my spiritual practice. At the very heart of this ancient lineage is the tension of desire and want and the transmutation of those elements into the sacral energy of creation.
Not the Western, bastardized version of Tantra where people play with sexual energies to produce individual pleasure. That’s the opposite of what this lineage teaches. This lineage is fueled by Kali and moved forward by the balance of shiva and shakti. My practice is designed to hold the Bloody Keys in an act of resistance to the dark triads of power destroying all that we hold dear.
Transmutating desire into creation requires the boundaries of separation be maintained by the people engaging in this dance of tantric mysticism. The fuel that powers the creation is derived directly from the strength of the artists not to collapse into desire itself. We redirect that desire, we don’t indulge in it. We aren’t consuming the passion, we’re channeling it to the creations that needs to exist.
Sculpting with flames and co-creating from heat. This is the work of Kali and it is necessary.
A creation that couldn’t exist on its own. Creation of the Tantric type requires this tension between two people. A creation that spawns a rare love of its own. Again, not the Western interpretation of love. We’re not talking about happily ever after or the passion of two people that sets the world aflame as they consummate that passion by collapsing into one. Those emotions are fleeting. And while passion and romance are lovely aspects of the human experience, they aren’t the point. Societal contracts and patriarchal expectations have wedged people into lifelong relationships who probably should have just parted ways once the passion died, which is the reality for many. Soul level connections are partnerships that create a different type of “Love”.
Love as a verb, as Bell Hooks so eloquently explores in All About Love. Love IS a verb. I was having a conversation with a lifelong friend yesterday, a childhood bestie reaching back 45 years. The type of friendship strong enough to withstand extended periods of disconnect as lives spiral and settle and spiral again. Yet the reconnection surges in a few minutes of a phone call and 45 years of shared experience and love flows back as though time was just a false construct. She’s been battling Stage 4 cancer for 2 years now and doing so with a grace and stubbornness that inspires me daily. We spoke about her husband of 25+ years and how amazing he’s been in supporting and maintaining her boundaries through all of this. Boundaries a weaker man and a marriage without Love as a Verb could not withstand.
That’s love. Love grounded and visible through actions, not words. When we can love completely and without question in a way that allows the love to grow, have boundaries and eventually leave, we have touched the type of love that so few truly know and we all so desperately need as our world collapses.
Love built for the flames of now, grounded in presence and fortified in resilience.
I was raised in a home built on such a love. My parents loved one another in a way that was so rare, and so beautiful, it served as both a power source and a magnet. Our home was a place our friends and family came to find safety, joy and connection. My parents made lifelong friends in everything they did– PTA meetings, weekends at the soccer field, evenings at the racquetball club– everywhere we went, we were surrounded by friends that functioned as family. Community built on Love as a Verb.
Growing up in such a solid container of love gave me a foundation to build massive capacity for creation as an adult. I also never found that type of love in an intimate relationship as an adult, yet. I am alot and never met a man who could both Love as a Verb and handle all of me. Hell, even I couldn’t handle all of me until I stepped into the world of tantra.
I understand how absolutely rare and beautiful such a childhood is, and it is why I am the yogi and artist I am today. I have a deep, DEEP capacity for holding afflictive emotions – sorrow, grief, evil, anger, rage, injustice and despair. I speak those languages well and can hold space in those terrifying shadows. I know this. I learned what sorrow truly is at the age of 23, when adulthood and independence from the ones who raised you truly begins. My father died suddenly and it broke all of our hearts and shattered our worlds. Deeply. That type of sorrow is not one I wish on my worst enemy. That type of sorrow carves a spot in your soul and stays. It never leaves. How could it?
But that sorrow, at that age, created an energetic connection to sorrow in others and one that I transmuted into photojournalism and documentary photography. The fact that I was raised in love and entered adulthood in sorrow gave me the emotional capacity to document the aftermath of evil. I only did post-conflict work for a few years because the weight of such devastation leaves its own trauma on everyone that touches it. But in those few years, I witnessed humanity in a way that was only possible through Tension, Love & Death. It was a solo endeavor and probably the reason the work was brief, it’s too much for one person to carry.
Which brings us back to the work of death. We are living through an unprecedented time where all the systems we took as a given are collapsing. And mostly at the same time. This is death and grief at scale. And the tantrika yogis are holding space in the cremation grounds of Kali’s precision flames and building the containers we need to survive her flames and harness the heat for what will rise from her ashes.
In the cremation grounds, the wild-knowing ones who embrace partnership through creation will build the infrastructure we need for a tomorrow we can all embrace. A tomorrow where resilience is the foundation and love is the framework. A tomorrow where Tension, Love & Death provide the container for all of us to create beauty. In partnership. Together.
This essay is AI-free and grew out of the work from my brilliant podcast co-host, Taylor Kendal (please click that link and go deep with his recent Tayken on the Quarter essay) and his recent exploration of Tension as Technology and the latest work at The Human Layer. We're exploring our individual operating systems, archetypes and the merging of them all into a collective operating system and archetype for myth-making and the creation of infrastructure for the tomorrow built on Tension, Love & Death. Brace yourself, the Runner and the Monk are in full creation mode.
