Love: Spark and Ash

How Love Creates All We Worship—and All We Destroy

Every song, every war, every heartbreak, every piece of art. Love is the fire that builds empires and burns them to the ground. We call it sacred, but it’s not always kind. Sometimes it saves us. Sometimes it ruins us. And still, we chase it.

Love Is the Spark

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (c. 1512) — The divine spark of creation, love as the breath that awakens life.

Every song is a love song. Even the ones written in rage, silence, or sorrow. Strip them down to their pulse and you’ll find the same thing: the imprint of desire, of something once held close and then lost. Without love, there would be no music. No mythologies. No wars or weddings. No cathedrals, lullabies, or revolutions. Love is the origin story behind every empire—and every ruin.

Love Makes You Blind

We like to speak of love as sacred. But love wears many masks. Love of self, bloated and unchecked, becomes narcissism. Love of family, when turned inward, breeds exclusion. Love of race or nation too fervently, too righteously, births catastrophe. The Holocaust. The Crusades. Every genocide in history has been justified by a twisted form of love. Devotion without discernment. Possession mistaken for care. Power disguised as passion.

Every atrocity has roots in some form of love—misplaced, weaponized, or worshipped.

When Love Hurts

Even in our private lives, the devastation of love is not always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet. The mother who disappears beneath the weight of her children. The father who forgets how to breathe after his daughter’s death. The lover who starves himself of joy just to keep a promise. We call these acts noble, but what if devotion is just self-erasure made poetic?

Love, when it forgets itself, becomes sacrifice without sanctity. A blade that cuts both ways.

Between Love and Indifference

But what is the alternative? Apathy? That, too, is a kind of death. Hatred is love that has decayed. Jealousy is love twisted by fear. Grief is love with no place left to land. Even cruelty can be traced to love denied or love lost. Every so-called negative emotion is, in some form, a cry for love.

So maybe the question is not whether love is dangerous. It is. The question is how we hold it. Whether we carry it consciously, like fire in a lantern—contained, luminous, alive.

Love Conquers All

Auguste Rodin, The Kiss (1882–1889) — A frozen moment of passion, love’s intimate dance between souls.

Love is the same force that moves a stranger to step into flames for someone else. It builds sanctuaries and topples dictators. It stitches communities. Fills cradles. Paints murals on the ruins of old cities. It is the divine madness behind every symphony, every sacrifice, every soft rebirth.

There’s a story from Chinese history: an emperor, desperate to make his concubine smile, lit the emergency fires atop the Great Wall just to stage a spectacle. The armies rushed in vain. Later, when a real invasion came, no one answered. The fires had lost their meaning. The kingdom fell. Was it love? Or ego clothed in silk? Either way, an empire was lost to misplaced devotion.

The Ghost in the Story

All the stories we pass down—legends, scriptures, fables—are really the same story. A heart either blooming or breaking. Love crowned or cursed. Joy or grief, but never apathy. Because love is the thread that runs through every scream, every sonnet, every silence.

Maybe this is why we write. Why we compose, dance, create. Even when love scorches us, it transforms us. It tears us open and leaves us raw—but in that rawness, we are most alive.

Between the spark and the ash, we become. And despite everything, we keep reaching for the flame.

How We Live and Die

I confess: I don’t know anything about love. Not really. Not whether I want it. Not whether I was built for it. I’ve studied it, sung to it, blamed it, begged for it, and still I cannot tell you if it is right for me.

Our breaths are limited. And if I must choose between safety and the unknown—between numbness and setting fire to my own chest—I will always choose the flame.

Because even if it ruins me, love is the most beautiful way to die.