“Why do humans create tradition when love is threatened? How does love, haunted by the fear of loss, give rise to tradition? Understanding Belitong Geopark as an affective archive and faithfulness is an ethical commitment to what is loved.” – Arry Aditsya Yoga | Researcher in International Law, Ecopolitology, and Anthropology.
Philosophy understands love as an ontological event, a movement toward the other that opens up the world while simultaneously rendering the subject vulnerable, wounded, and exposed to time. In this tradition, love is not merely a feeling, but a mode of being in the world. Plato, through Diotima in the Symposium, asserts that eros never signifies possession of beauty, but rather longing for what one does not have. Love, therefore, carries within itself the potential for loss from the outset. It grows out of lack, distance, and uncertainty. On the other side, modern neuropsychology interprets love as a neurochemical and neuroaffective configuration, an activation of the SEEKING and CARE systems in the mammalian brain, as formulated by Jaak Panksepp, involving dopamine, oxytocin, and limbic circuits that sustain attachment and species survival. Within this framework, love appears measurable, replicable, and even predictable.
Yet the tension between these two approaches becomes unmistakable when love ends. Heartbreak does not merely reveal neurochemical dysfunction, but also entails the collapse of a world of meaning. What disintegrates is not only the balance of dopamine or oxytocin, but the existential structure that has long supported how a person understands and inhabits the world. The world suddenly feels alien, inhospitable, and disoriented. It is precisely at this point that biological reductionism reveals its limits, and love exposes its most radical ontological character. It is not merely an adaptive function, but a relation that shapes human existence in its entirety. Sigmund Freud, through the concept of object-loss, long emphasized that mourning is the inseparable shadow of love. Love is always accompanied by anxiety over losing its object, and when such loss occurs, the wound is both psychic and existential.
Spinoza, in the Ethics, defines love as laetitia concomitante idea causae externae, or joy accompanied by the awareness of its external cause. This definition contains a profound irony. If the external cause is fragile, altered, or destroyed, joy inevitably turns into sadness. In the context of human relations with nature, this means that love for landscapes, whether sea, land, wind, or non-human beings, intrinsically contains the potential for grief. When nature, as the external cause, undergoes ecological disturbance, human love for it cannot remain neutral or safe. Ecological heartbreak, therefore, is not a sentimental metaphor, but a logical consequence of affective relations with an unstable world.
Belitong UNESCO Global Geopark provides a concrete context for these theoretical tensions. Here, the sea and ancient geology are not merely economic backdrops or objects of exploitation, but elements of an intergenerational structure of existential attachment. The sea is a space of origin, labor, memory, and return. As climate change renders the sea increasingly unpredictable, waves grow more violent, seasons shift, and catches decline. Coastal communities face not only economic crises, but also affective and ontological ones. What is lost is not merely fish, but a sense of security, trust, and future orientation. In this experience, ecological heartbreak is lived collectively.
The Selamat Laut ritual emerges in this context not as a residue of pre-modern belief, but as a ritual art that functions as an affective technology for negotiating ecological heartbreak. From the perspective of psychological anthropology, the ritual operates as a mechanism of containment, allowing anxiety and fear over the loss of livelihoods to be channeled into symbolic forms that can be collectively endured. From an aesthetic and ethical perspective, Selamat Laut is a performance of love that is conscious of relational asymmetry. Humans love a sea that cannot promise fidelity. Ritual offerings to the sea are acts of giving marked by complete vulnerability, a love that does not dominate, does not demand reciprocity, and for that very reason approaches what Erich Fromm describes as mature love. Fromm insists that love is not a passive feeling, but an active practice that presupposes care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. In Selamat Laut, love for nature takes shape as care without the illusion of control.
Rituals in Belitong play a role that far exceeds mere symbolic function. When considering food-related practices, food becomes an ontological medium that connects body, memory, and landscape. Food studies demonstrate that taste and aroma are among the most powerful triggers of memory. Neuropsychology affirms that eating together activates social attachment systems, while material philosophy views food as the most intimate point of encounter between humans and the world. As marine yields decline, ritual food no longer merely celebrates abundance but also mourns its possible disappearance.
“It becomes grief that can be eaten, love that can be tasted on the tongue, and sorrow that is slowly swallowed so it does not shatter the collective soul.”
Love, longing, and fear of loss also give rise to other traditions, such as Muang Jong, which brings love into a deeper temporal dimension. Miniature boats released into the sea serve as memory artifacts connecting the present with ancestors or deeply loved ones, not through linear historical narration, but through symbolic gestures that repeatedly enact separation. Within a psychoanalytic framework, this practice may be read as a form of melancholic attachment, an attachment that refuses to fully relinquish a lost object. Yet rather than being pathological, Muang Jong is culturally productive. It sustains continuity of meaning across generations, especially as climate change threatens to sever cosmological ties to the sea. In philosophical terms of time, this constitutes a form of temporal folding, where the past never fully passes but is continually reactivated as a source of ethical orientation.
Similarly, Nyawar Angin and Selamat Kampong illustrate how love operates on a collective scale when nature becomes unstable. In affect theory, fear that is shared does not weaken a community. When processed through symbols and rites, it strengthens social cohesion. These rituals function as an aesthetics of protection, through which love for one another and for place is expressed via prayer, communal meals, and collective action. Within the framework of the political philosophy of emotions, they demonstrate that safety is not solely a matter of physical infrastructure, but also of culturally cultivated feelings of security.
At a deeper level, fear of loss gives rise to the Bejampi’ tradition on Belitong Island, which brings love into the most fragile territory of the body, seeking to understand pain and the limits of death. In the medical limitations of the past, fear of losing loved ones generated a system of knowledge combining local botany, psychological suggestion, and spiritual symbolism. Modern neuropsychology acknowledges that belief and the feeling of being cared for influence healing processes, while care itself is an ethical relation rather than a mere technical intervention. Bejampi’ transforms the Belitong landscape into a therapeutic space, where plants, humans, and meaning intertwine. It is love that works quietly, without promises of cure, yet full of fidelity.
Climate change complicates this entire network of love and produces heartbreak on a planetary scale. Donna Haraway urges humans to stay with the trouble, to resist fleeing from the complexity of human–non-human relations. Timothy Morton describes this condition as dark ecology, an awareness that human entanglement with the world is always ambiguous, saturated with grief, and never fully harmonious. Seen in this light, the arts and rituals of Belitong are not romanticizations of nature, but practices of living with ecological uncertainty. They neither deny loss nor promise total recovery, but teach how to love a fragile world without illusions of stability.
Ultimately, if Plato is right that love is born of lack, if Spinoza is right that love depends on fragile external causes, if Fromm is right that love is an active practice, if Freud is right that love is always shadowed by mourning, if Panksepp is right that love is rooted in the body, and if Haraway and Morton are right that humans must love a troubled world, then Belitong UNESCO Global Geopark offers a living synthesis.
“Here, pure love is not safe love, but love that dares to remain present, to continue caring, and to remain faithful to a changing world through art, through food, through ritual, and through the willingness to accept that heartbreak is not the end of love, but proof that love truly took place.”
Corresponding Author: Arry Aditsya Yoga | Researcher in International Law, Ecopolitology, and Anthropology.