(I wrote this one in honor of Valentine’s day tomorrow - and make sure to check out the three event invitations at the end.)
It’s a cute word.
Cute in the way that a small-yappy dog in too small-and-yappy of a sweater is cute.
Cute in the way, passing a trite-yet-still-romantic proposal on the beach is cute…
…Definitely cute in the way a white woman’s instagram is cute.
#ohmygoddess
However, when recently a woman I love dearly called me her “sweetie” in an social media post… I cringed.
It felt like hearing a bell rung slightly off-key.
Affectionate?
Yes.
At all accurate to our relational truth?
Hell no.
And given the existential-AF obsessive-about-language human that I am, I recently, while in a bath, began to ponder what was really rubbing me about this otherwise sweet term of endearment.
Sweet is a flavor you visit - a dessert - a momentary pleasure at the end of a meal. Something to be enjoyed occasionally that lights you up, but certainly nothing to live by.
In contrast, the love this lady and I love are practicing - it ain’t no dessert.
It is Protein and Power.
Heat and Fiber…
…The type food that demands thorough chewing and my entire metabolic system to wake-the-fuck up and participate.
Strong food as she tells her four and half year old, nudging him to kitchari when he only wants to eat dates.
No, this lady and I aren’t sweeties..
we are more like a sacred wrestling partners.
This love is a high-contact, full-presence, sweat and blood endeavor.
Two nervous systems meeting in honesty.
Clashing, yielding and always shaping one another, not so much by our victories, but as my poet-hero Rilke once penned, we grow together more beautiful, “by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings,” which in this case, is mature love.
Mature Love
where she ain’t my sweetie..
she’s my meat and potatoes.
I spent ten years making a film about a community in Portugal who were deliberately initiating themselves into mature love - not as hallmark romance - but as a cultural technology.
Their wager was simple and radical: that the maturation of love is a necessary condition for peace. That without grown-up love, we cannot build a regenerative culture.
A culture of immature romance and sex is a culture constellated by the power of war, instead of the power of love.
And yet, despite knowing this intellectually for years, I’m still stunned by how deep the conditioning runs.
Hollywood sells us love as sweetness.
Pop music sells us love as infatuation.
Our language sells us love as sweet and honey.
We are reinforced over and over in the narrative that love should feel good, should feel affirming, should melt into our being without effort like a ice-cream on a hot summer day.
And when it doesn’t, we assume something is wrong.
But what if what’s wrong is the model?
This reckoning collided, for me, with another one many of us have been sitting in lately: the slow, horrifying unveiling of elite networks of sexual abuse - the Epstein revelations, and everything they gesture toward.
What becomes visible is not only criminality, but immaturity - sexuality arrested at a pre-initiatory stage and amplified by power.
A fetishization of youth.
Of smoothness.
Of sweetness.
And suddenly, that word took on a darker gravity.
Because when I really sit with it, sweet evokes something young, pre-sovereign and not yet initiated by death, loss, or consequence.
And that - terrifyingly - is exactly what has been eroticized by men of perverse power.
This is not what turns me on.
It is not what should turn on any mature, well-integrated adult.
And yet our culture continues to code desirability as youthfulness - eternal smoothness; botox, boob jobs and butt-lifts.
Transcendence. Up and out.
This isn’t accidental.
It is what happens when a culture loses its relationship to death.
To ancestry.
To place.
To blood and soil and decay and return.
When we are not rooted in lineage, death becomes a terror instead of a teacher. And so we cling to youth. We cling to sweetness. We cling to the fantasy of being untouched by time.
But nature does not tolerate such an imbalance.
A culture that feeds itself primarily on sweetness will inevitably starve - and starvation always produces perversion, eventually… let’s get the next high.. and an even higher one after that.. all the way until secret satanic child-sex rituals on private islands with your elite confidantes… just becomes the next thing.
A culture that refuses descent grows a long shadow.
The higher we climb away from matter, mother, death, and the feminine, the further down into perversion the shadow is forced to go to compensate.
And this is not moral judgment… it is ecological law.
Balance (homeostasis) will always win out.
Mature (balanced) love is not sweet.
It is forged and it is practiced.
It is conflict metabolized, grief allowed, and desire honed…
the type of desire that feeds life instead of takes…
an eroticism that includes age, texture, scars, and consequence.
So as we approach this Valentine’s day I want to offer this not as a thesis, but as an invitation:
I want to love you all ~ And in that love, I do not want to be made sweet with - I want to be wrestled with.
Meet me here?
Bring your disagreement.
Bring your resistance.
Bring your lived experience.
What concepts of love do you unconsciously speak and practice? What metaphors do you unconsciously feed?
What revolution are you ready to enact in your notions of love?
I want the type of mature love that smells like sweat and truth.
That has boar bristles in it.
That has mythic density.
….May your love grow some teeth on this holiday .. for I know I’m not the only one that wildly likes to be bitten.
xo,
John Wolfstone
1.) Our final information session for Brit Adam - the Jewish Men’s Year-Long Initiation and Ceremonial Arts Training will take place March 1st at 4:30pm PST.
I’m so excited about the beautiful cohort forming and the transformative journey to come.
2.) Our first Regenerative Oracle Live will be Feb 25th at 12:00pm PST. This event will be a live conversation with teacher and friend Gibran Rivera, titled:
From Fragility to Fortitude: Regenerative Justice Work Beyond Woke and Amidst Collapse.
As our inaugural gathering, this one is open to all. Going forward, these monthly conversations will be reserved for paid subscribers - part live podcast, part mythic oracle for our times, a place where we listen for what is breaking and what is being born.
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3.) Lastly, our first Office Hours will be February 23rd at 10am PST.
This, too, will soon be for paid subscribers only, but this first one is also open to all of you!
If you’d like to join this early circle, the Zoom link is here.
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If this work nourishes you, I invite you to become a paid subscriber and support it through joining our community. The Oracle grows through relationship.
Thank you!
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