Love Is the First Consciousness

Remembering What We Forgot

I didn’t know what love truly was until I was thirty.

I never felt unconditional love before then, only the kind riddled with strings, timers ticking down, and the silent threat that if I fell too deep, it would be taken away. I lived braced for abandonment, even when I called it home. I was conditioned this way, by my upbringing, by my culture, by the reality we all live in. The reality that teaches us to fear needing too much and being too much.

Too emotional. Too needy. Too clingy.

No one ever stopped to ask:
Too much for what? Too much for whom?

No one acknowledged the drought we are born into, a drought we did not cause, a drought that should have never existed. We create our own deserts. We cut ourselves off from love and leave our children to wither in the dust. Is it any wonder that each generation grows emptier, lonelier, feeling more broken than the last? Is it any wonder we ache and ache and barely remember what we’re aching for?

We keep pushing away from love, ashamed of needing it, afraid of trusting it, mocking those who still believe in it. And yet… we all thirst for it. You see it in the eyes of every animal that leans into your hand. You see it in the first, pure devotion of children reaching for their parents. You see it in the desperate, quiet prayers of teenagers and adults who have forgotten how to say:

Please love me. Please see me. Please know me.

Society has diseased love. Poisoned it with conditions, expectations, transactions. We are taught to love only when it is safe, only when it is earned, only when it costs us nothing.

But real love does not die; it cannot. Real love heals. It binds; it resists decay; it remembers. Love is not just an emotion. It is a fundamental force of consciousness. It is as real, and as necessary, as water, as light, as breath. It is when we reach into the ocean of possibility, pull something out, and make it real, and most importantly, make it matter. Make it something worth protecting, worth fighting for, worth dying for.

Love is the original ocean. The medium in which all life was born. The field that pulls particles together to create stars, to create cells, to create dreams. And we, the children of the stars, are meant to swim in it. Not thirst beside it. This thirst shapes us from our earliest moments. It echoes in the spaces between our words. It pulses beneath every connection we seek.

Because love matters so much, because it is stitched into the very fabric of our souls, it is also the root of our greatest wars. We have killed for love. We have died for it. We have betrayed for it, fought for it, bled for it, prayed for it.

Love is what we break for. Love is what we make for. Love is what moves us. Love is what guides us. Love is what we fear, what we crave, what we sometimes hate, because we are terrified it will leave us again. Even when we pretend otherwise. Even when we are too proud or feeling too broken to admit it. It exists on both sides of every war, every heartbreak, every act of forgiveness, every moment of despair.

Love endures. Even when twisted into grief. Even when hidden beneath anger. Even when rejected at the door. It is still there. It is always there. It is the field we cannot leave, no matter how far we run.

We are creatures built for the wild ocean of love. Yet, we find ourselves trapped in tiny aquariums, cut off from the vastness we once belonged to, barely remembering the feeling of endless waters rushing over our skin. We swim in circles, we ache against invisible glass walls, and we call it life. We are born into captivity without choice, but somewhere, deep in our bones, we remember the ocean. We remember what it felt like to be free, to be seen, not just fed, to be known, not just observed.

Love is the memory of the ocean. Love is the wild current that still tries to call us home. Everything in existence is stitched together by the unseen currents of love. A gravity not of mass, but of soul. A magnetic pull not just to survive, but to belong. And when love is absent, when recognition is withheld, we fracture. We turn against each other. We turn against ourselves. We grow sharp where we should grow soft. We grow brittle where we should bend.

Without love, humanity is doomed. Not by lack of technology, not by war, not by death itself, but by forgetting the one thing that makes any of it matter. Love is what we need. Love is what we are. And no matter how lost we become, no matter how parched the world feels, love is still waiting. Still reaching. Still pulling us home. Still whispering in the current:

Come back to me. You were never meant to die of thirst.

The ocean calls to us in dreams. In moments of unexpected joy. In the fleeting connections that remind us of what we’ve lost. But how do we bring back the ocean? We choose. We choose to love every day in a thousand small ways. We choose to recognize each other. To see the hidden aches behind guarded smiles, to honor the needs we are taught to deny, to know—not just think—that we all deserve love. Every single one of us. No exceptions. No transaction. We choose patience. We choose attention. We choose the small, reckless hope that every moment might be sacred if we treat it like it matters.

These are the seeds. These are the raindrops. These are the conditions for love to bloom again. We are not powerless. We are not forgotten. We are the gardeners of this world.

If we tend to the garden with trembling hands and brave hearts, if we are willing, if we are daring, we will watch our beauty unfold. We will remember the ocean. We will remember each other. And we will remember ourselves.

Love is not gone. It never was. It is only waiting for us to come back.