What Is Real Love? It Is Water and Fire

There is a tenderness in love that is completely real, and it is only part of the truth.

The culture teaches the tender part first, and teaches it well. Love as the candle in the wind. The precious flame kept in an inner sanctum, guarded against the wrong hands, saved for the one who will finally be trusted to see it. Something delicate that could be blown out by the wrong breath, so it must be protected, withheld, kept safe until the right moment arrives. Bruce Lyon does not deny any of this. He says plainly that it is true. The heart is tender. It does keep something precious. The error is in believing that tenderness is the whole of what love is.

Because love is also a raging fire. The most powerful thing in the universe. And a fire is not a candle. A candle can be blown out by a child leaning over a cake. Fire cannot be blown out. It is a wild, raging being, and at its full extent it is the entire universe in motion.

The heart, Lyon says, is made of both elements. It is water and it is fire. The water is compassion, the capacity to feel another heart and to feel the grief of the whole planet, the green and merciful element that welcomes everything back. The Diamond Approach speaks of this as one of the essential qualities of the soul, a kindness that is not sentiment but substance. And the same heart is fire, the red element, the courage that the word itself confesses, since courage carries rage inside it, the rage that rises from the solar plexus and beneath that from the erotic center and beneath that from the kundalini coiled at the base of the spine and the base of the world. The courage of the heart, Lyon says, is the earth itself standing up through a human being.

This is why the tender model of love, left alone, eventually disappoints. A love kept as a candle stays small enough to protect, and a love that stays protected never asks anything of the one protecting it. The fire is what asks. When two people pass out of the honeymoon and feel the heat begin, the ordinary mind reads it as the spark dying. What is actually happening is the fire beginning to do what fire does. It is reaching for everything in each of them that is not love, in order to burn it away.

A lover is not born tender and complete. A lover is built. Follow your heart, Lyon says, and you will break your heart, over and over and over, until you find out what the heart is for, which is breaking and healing and kneeling for the great love to move through. The discipline of the heart is real the way the discipline of the mind is real. No one expects a mature mind to arrive without study. The mature heart is no different. It is worked, and the work is mostly fire.

There is a shadow at the edge of this teaching, and the map should name it. The fire can be counterfeited. Intensity can be mistaken for depth, cruelty dressed as honesty, drama sold as passion, the language of burning used to excuse harm. Lyon is not pointing at any of that. The fire he means does not consume another person. It consumes the false in oneself. The test is simple and it is in the direction of the flame. Love’s fire burns away what is not you. It does not burn the one in front of you.

So the instruction the mystics left is the same one Lyon arrives at. Walk into the fire. Everything that is not you will be taken. And what remains when everything has burned is love itself, which never burns, can never burn, because it is the fire.

The candle was true. It was simply never the part of love that frees.