Public Republic

Velina Vateva

Photo: Andrew Stawarz

We freely speak of dreams
We marvel at what they conceal
But in my wonderworld
Each sleeping vision is so real
So I believe and hope
That all the things I see
May one day bring
Such truth and peace
As we can feel

Wonderworld, Uriah Heep

The day is here again, as if it has never been gone. Lets take a trip together to the side of love we usually forget about – not the immense and “everlasting” love, but to the love that declines and urgently swallows each and every boundary. The boundaries love adores the most, the ones that are most appealing to her, are the boundaries within us.

We all hope for love – to love and to be loved, though we scarcely dare to question ourselves about love, about our love. However, I am prone to think it is something normal, at least because the ground love lies on – but perhaps love never simply lies on it, it would rather so naturally nourish the earth, giving its breath and rhythms of breathing – is the most magical and impossible to guess of all imaginable and unimaginable foundations in the world and beyond the thinkable and unthinkable.

Photo: daylight

There it is, love, beyond our “natural” boundaries – the most fragile and yet the tightest knot we could possibly tie and wish never to untie. We are most authentic, which means most scared, when we come to recognize the simple truth that this “something”, which is already bound, is not only living in us. It is also flying and has always been flying towards, as it not only seems, its inevitable end. Although the knot keeps the only key for its own untangling, we have our trust in this key – if we did not have it, we have nothing at all.

Photo: Sabrina Campagna

The insecurity has always been the most confident substance, no matter that we so rarely dare to say this to ourselves. When love is being born – can you feel love now – it is the beginning of something elusive in its fragility, brittleness, and transparency. The unthinkable is always strange and perplexes us when it becomes real, which happens more often than we are likely to think. So the unthinkable becomes a fact: love lives through its vagueness, which gives us all the pictures of the whole world in each moment.

Photo: karpov85

Love never hurts – because it is here to stay, because it has promised to leave behind the tiny wound we need to feel everything worthwhile. Love could be to be something like the window you always wished to have in your house, like the gentlest eye in the sky. Thus the wound gives you the most brilliant gift you could possibly ever be given.

Photo: seanmcgrath

What she gives you is the only immense essence of your life, which, not after all but before anything, is your warmth, the warmth of both of you, in you as one. So here it is, always deeper and deeper, sweeter and sweeter, the long and winding road that leads to the door where the never-ending story dwells. Who do you possibly think has been always sitting on the lap of the story? And has never needed any sleep…

Happy St. Valentine’s Day to all of you!

Photo: faith goble

“I am so happy here, with you, that I cannot escape the feeling of persistent danger.”Romain Gary