To Live Among the Blooms
A Pride Month Reflection on Love, Risk, and Freedom
Falling in love is almost never straightforward. So many clichés have tried—and failed—to capture the wild, raw experience of being awakened to potential. A truth revealed is an invitation to embrace yourself—and sometimes, it becomes the secret that sets a pattern of hiding into motion.
Meeting my wife was a quick recognition of the most alive parts of myself, and a slow, sometimes terrifying growth into freedom. Through risk and surrender, I carved a path for life to flourish—but not without first existing in the dark of the earth.
Love, in its purest form, is a hero’s journey toward liberation. Yes, it’s intoxicating, romantic, and deeply comforting—but it also demands presence, choice, authenticity, and consent. You have to show up—and the unknown of what happens when you do, that’s the dragon faced.
Building a life toward the “hell, yes” experiences I could never have dreamed of when I was a teenager writing in my True Love Waits journal is entirely because of the love that unexpectedly walked into my dorm room seventeen years ago. There was no way I could have predicted what falling in love in college would mean for me.
And while that’s probably true for anyone who falls in love, the need to liberate myself in order to embrace it wasn’t part of the clichés I read in my Bible study classes.
What we’ve built together is the result of both of us showing up—again and again—for a thirteen-year journey toward liberation. And that was just to come out to the world. Now, we keep choosing it every day: tending this love, giving it space to breathe and bloom above the surface of the soil we rooted in.
What we’re growing sometimes feels like it’s in opposition to the larger ecosystem—gritty, nonconforming, and only noticed as beautiful by some.
Their loss.
Love, when it’s allowed to thrive, opens new freedoms for all—personal, creative, cultural, systemic. It reimagines the world, creating space for the variety of landscapes that pull us into awe. It is audacious art.
It isn’t simple, but it is wild—the most beautiful place to exist. Yes, some people want to bulldoze wild spaces or only visit them for the photographs. But that’s about them, not about the beauty itself.
I’m reminding myself of this right now. I recently read a post about Pride month and felt a spark of inspiration. But the moment I thought, I could write a post about the beauty of queer love, I froze.
I thought about how dangerous it can feel to be exposed. The soil was safer.
Now that my own liberation has empowered me to bloom in the world, I still feel the fear of owning it.
But it’s too late for that. I know too much now. I can see the beauty, the art, the freedom of living among the blooms.
As Pride month begins, I feel the desire to honor what came alive in me—what was buried, what bloomed. But I also want to honor this transformation in every person who has walked a similar path. I recognize those who tilled this soil before me, who made it safer for my existence. I hold their fight for liberation close to heart this month. They took the risks my fear says are too great. They fought and won. And because of them, I get to live in fabulous flair. Yes, I still had my own hero’s journey, and I faced my dragon—but because of them, I learned that was even an option.
To each of you who resonates with this:
I hope we find each other in the wild.
I hope we show up knowing that our love, actualized, is the only thing that will save us. It’s the only thing that ever has.
Each of us showing up—with love for ourselves and where we are in our journey—is worth the risk.
You are audacious art.
Happy Pride,
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