Libra Season and Climbing the Ladder of Love

My first love letter to you

September had its turbulence and turmoil. As I welcome October with Libra season and this Libra new moon, I feel myself falling in love again. I reminisce on love and daydream of myself gathering all my lovers around a table, holding a glass of wine and giving a toast to Love. I present myself to the world as a lover and I want the world to remember me as a lover. I am a lover of beauty, I am a lover to my friends, I am a lover of refinement and taste, I am a lover of speech and poetry, I am a lover of languages and the world, I am a lover to other lovers, and I am a lover to myself. Since I have begun my journey of loving myself, I began to love everything around me; I allowed love to become a state of being and not an action; a constant vacillation between being Love and being in love, something I have learned from the Aries/Libra axis.

As I grow into the version of myself embodying love, I find myself focusing more on how I can give love to myself and others rather than daydreaming about how I want to be loved. This process of climbing the Ladder of Love is not an easy one, sometimes I find myself climbing the steps up and down, not knowing where to stay or where to land. Sometimes I even question if the love I had given was enough or genuine. I rarely question the love I receive, I believe it is not my role or place to do so in this journey of love. If I give more love and receive less, that simply means I have reached a higher step on the ladder; I could wait for you and lend you my hand to climb up but I could also decide to keep going and look for my next step. Maybe we will find each other at the top and we will love again, together this time.

I have read about, looked for and sought for the meaning in love and it always involved the presence of a second party when defining it. Love is a dialogue, Love is waiting, Love is rejection, Love is a social construct (my favourite one, defined and used and reused by some pretentious “intellectuals” with unhealed partnership issues), Love is an action (this definition is one that I value higher than the previous ones, it holds a lot of personal and cultural significance for me in my partnerships). I have stopped to try to define love and simply live it, live by it, live through it. Flipping through pages will not define what love is, for you, but it will certainly open doors for you to understand its patterns, its vices and its virtues.

Here are some great writings about Love (ranked from easiest to more rigorous reads):

• Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions.

• Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.

• Onfray, Michel. Théorie du corps amoureux: Pour une érotique solaire.

• Plato on Friendship and Eros

• Buber, Martin. I and Thou.

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  I hope as you read this, you fall in love slowly, with yourself, with the world, with love and maybe with my words, even if it is only for a few seconds.

  Until next time,

  With love always,

  Salma.

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  I present you this poem I wrote, it is also about love, it is always about love:

  It’s a Friday night in America

  It was never about the when or what or how, nor the why in this moment, nor was it about dancing to our song, nor is it about quoting Frank O’hara or reciting Baudelaire half in French half in English, with the whistles of our laughter bathing in the whiskey on the table, nor it is about how wonderful to see a friend three years and four different countries later, two lovers later who came back to see what it will all be about, 

  is it about the lovers who will never see each other again but will keep sending letters to each other, or is it about counting the days to Spring, and Spring in Canada comes with his lovers and friends, sending back the love letters all the way down to the Great Lakes. It is never about how to rhyme love with you, or you with me, nor is it about Beat Poetry, mentioned at youth’s dawn, between an 11am lecture and a Sunday hangover 

  It is always what it seems to be, a homage, a citation, a note in half forgotten dreams, it is a Friday night in America.