Love is.
Love is not.

This is a passion project that came out of my own relationship with love and the many ways that relationship has changed throughout my life. I was a young boy who was loved deeply by his mother, father and immediate family, and I was incredibly fortunate to have that foundation. I wasn't raised religiously, so I never really knew what that looked like, and my parents weren't particularly spiritual in their daily lives either. What I did have was nature. I grew up in remote villages along the British Columbia coast, surrounded by ocean, mountains and forest, and even as a young boy I felt deeply connected to something there. I didn't have words for it and I certainly didn't call it God, but looking back now I can see there was always something in me that felt connected to something much larger than myself.

Then came my teenage years and I discovered love with women, and oh boy, that opened up an entirely different classroom. Those relationships brought intimacy, desire, connection, attachment, fear, insecurity and heartbreak, and somewhere along the way I developed an unhealthy attachment to what I thought love was supposed to feel like. Those patterns presented themselves through most of my relationships until my late 30s.

Through the years my understanding of life continued to shift and change, and around the age of 38 I discovered God in the religious sense. I dove deeply into the Christian faith and started learning about Jesus and his teachings, and I loved so much of what was being offered, especially around love, forgiveness, surrender and service. But there was still something that didn't fully land for me. I was being told what my relationship with God should look like instead of being encouraged to discover what that relationship actually was for myself. I realized I didn't just want to believe in God because someone told me to. I wanted to know God through my own direct experience.

Then came plant and animal medicines, and that opened an entirely different door. These modalities helped me sink deeper into my own being and begin learning about myself in ways I had never experienced before, which eventually led me into what I can only describe as knowing God on the deepest level I had experienced. Through philosophy, spiritual and esoteric texts, medicine work, contemplation, relationships, suffering, mistakes and simply living this beautifully strange human life, I started shedding the programming and conditioning I had collected as a child and young adult.

All of this kept leading me deeper and deeper into understanding myself, but ultimately it kept bringing me back to one word: love. And the more I explored love, the more I realized I didn't actually know what the fuck we were talking about when we used that word. I love my son. I love my friends. I love a woman. I love nature. I love God. I love my dog. I love a good meal. I love you. Yet obviously those aren't all describing the same experience.

Then I began learning how different languages, philosophies and spiritual traditions distinguish between experiences that English often crams into this one little four-letter word. Sensual desire, attachment, tenderness, friendship, compassion, parental affection, devotion to the divine, longing, selfless love and even forms of love that seem to have no object at all. This blew my mind and honestly rewired something in me.

So out of all of this I've come to have my own relationship with the word love, while also realizing just how wildly subjective our experience of it can be. And that is really what this project is about. I'm not here to tell you what love is. I'm far more interested in asking you what you have discovered it to be.

Where do you stand with love — not just conceptually, but through your own lived experience? What does love feel like in your body? What does it look like when nobody is watching? Where has love cracked you open? Where has it hurt you? Where have you withheld it? Where have you mistaken attachment, desire, fear or need for love? And where have you experienced something so pure that for even a moment there was nothing being asked for in return?

Maybe love has saved your life. Maybe it has broken your heart. Maybe you're still trying to figure out what the fuck it even is. All of that is welcome here. There are no right or wrong answers and there is nothing you need to sound like. You don't need to be spiritual, healed, wise or profound. Just be you.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being willing to be vulnerable and allowing me into the deepest recesses of yourself. I don't take that lightly.

Thank you. I love you. — Bassé