I have been thinking and feeling on love; love as a weapon, as a misunderstanding, love as an excuse, love as a cover up, love as a band aid, love as clinging to belonging, love as control, love as overwhelm. None of these descriptions resonate with my understanding of love but I have heard these utterances and whispers of love confuse the word and make me doubt if I even know what love is. Are we talking about the same thing? I don’t blame people, I mean, where would we learn love? Where could we? Who shows us how to stand for love? Walk with love? Embody love’s lush in our flesh and breath and gesture? I wasn’t shown explicitly. I’m figuring it out in the mish mash of my own life’s experience.
2007
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2020
My thoughts on love will likely continue to change with each moon cycle but I want to write these particular thoughts on love in this moment. Or rather, these thoughts on love are yearning to be written out of me. My beloved mentor and dear friend Quinn told me once that the body longs to write itself and I feel the shudder and clanging in my body as I churn and write this internal wondering out of myself.
Diversity and Inclusion >
I dislike this term because I associate it with performative institutional policy and procedure documents but I want to reclaim it as belonging with love. My understanding of diversity is lushness; a range of multiple, different, interdependent living things creating a robust, resilient, multi dimensional ecosystem. It brings to mind the permaculture principle use edges and value the marginal >
“The place where two eco-systems or habitats meet is generally more productive and richer in the variety of species present than either habitat on its own.”
So diversity is lush and the margins are valuable and dynamic.
My understanding of inclusion comes from Gestalt Therapist Dave Mann who writes that inclusion is to soften the contact boundary and allow one’s whole self to be stirred by the experience of another. This definition of inclusion sounds like love to me. In coming in to contact with another if I soften myself to include, I am allowing myself to be changed by their experience - a beautiful notion spoken by Victor Lewis in his tender, incendiary monologue in The Colour of Fear.
“You know, I’m not going to trust you until you’re as willing to be changed, and affected, by my experience and transformed by my experience as I am every day by yours.”
So if diversity is lushness and inclusion is to be transformed by another, then surely being changed by the experiences of a lush range of people is a commitment to love and growth? Another Gestalt writer, Mark Fairfield, writes
“..inclusion is also core to being human. In fact, we became human precisely because the most inclusive of our ancestors were the ones selected to survive. Inclusion became the human mandate.”
I know that the more diverse the people I love and am loved by, the more dynamic and rich my experience of love becomes growing my empathy, strength, self awareness and well being. It becomes imperative for me to broaden my circles and experiences with other humans for each person stirs and awakens whatever is reflected in myself and to live in a mono culture is to rob oneself of the opportunity to grow into the fullest fullness of love.
Love from above > I would describe love from above as the act of only loving that which you have power over. Teacher to student, adult to child, therapist to client, strong resourced person to under resourced person in need, dominating lover to subservient lover, savior to victim and so forth. There is a comfort in loving someone you can control, someone who cannot hold you to account, someone whose voice is less strong. Sometimes people insert themselves into the lives of another and make themselves indispensable in their act of saving whilst convincing the object of their affection that they are small and need saving. Sometimes the vulnerability in love feels so dangerous that the only safe place to love from is one of control. My lecturer at uni said to me once “When we rush to save someone, we risk making ourselves bigger than them and the last thing a person who is suffering needs is to feel even smaller in their suffering”. I have not been able to think of love the same way since hearing this.
When I meet my students for the first time I do everything I can to share power, let them know I am in service of them and will be guided by their needs if they can share them with me. I notice it suprises and confuses most young people who are accustomed to being saved or condescended or feared or loved from above. I notice as my own children get older I find our love more challenging as they grow from being in my full control and care into flexing their agency, giving me feedback and growing closer to being a peer than a child. The delicious and ease-ful love from above I gave them when they were small has transformed into a battle of their autonomy versus my ego. They are raising me well and I am growing.
I am certainly guilty of practicing love from above. I certainly feel comfortable being loved as the less-than person or giving love as the more-than person but I have struggled with the dignified love between two equals. I am learning into this and being especially cautious of people who try to love from above me.
Desire for belonging in another >
I feel an eternal frustration with the idea that love can be found and fully satisfied in one person. I pretty sure love exists within and between and around and requires place and body and community. Having nailed the dream by the time I was 22 with a husband, a house, two children and two cars, I thought I had made it and yet I was so deeply dissatisfied and felt cheated by an illusion. I think within individualistic western culture, because we generally don’t live communally and find our purpose in communal care, responsibility and survival, it is easy to pour all of our expectations of belonging into romantic relationships and the dream of a happy nuclear family. To expect the deep longing of belonging with people and place and self, to be satisfied by a colonial hetero normative illusion is disappointing at best and dangerous at worst. Dangerous because when I had all I thought I needed and was so miserable and empty I took responsibility and placed the problem within myself.
I need more than the dream, more people, more purpose, more to belong with.
This quote continues to remind me of how I need to belong first with myself, which may seem solitary as bell hooks describes but for me, always includes my ancestors who are wise and powerful company.
I have since grown in and out of other relationships and different shapes of family. I find it easier these days to belong with myself and with my children and with my feet walking steadily toward my purpose of justice and liberation. Then if someone wants to walk beside me, that is a lovely thing, if someone does not, that’s ok too.
I love this line of Warsan Shire’s poem For women who are difficult to love. I am guilty of trying to inhabit the hearts of others I deemed to be safer, better, stronger than myself. I now make home in my own self and venture out from time to time to visit other loves.
Love = Becoming >
Bear with me, sometimes I attempt to simplify overwhelming ideas into info graphics or mathematical equations.
Becoming = Realness = Truth = Justice = Love therefor Love = Becoming?
bell hooks says >
So the dignified equitable love which is hard and beautiful. bell hooks also says >
“The heart of justice is truth telling”
So justice is truth seeking and truth telling and truth is about what is real and to be real, as explained to the velveteen rabbit >
““It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” ”
And so realness comes slowly, you become. And love is justice is truth is realness is becoming.
So I am becoming.
This is what I want you to know about me: I am still learning love, growing into her fullness, turning my face to her warmth, shaking under her weight and floating in her weightless ease. And I am confused and step cautiously some days and with fierce purpose other days and some days I just weep and collapse from the grit and growing pains.
Onward I go in my lovegrowth, in my becoming, in becoming real and realer still. I hope you are lovegrowing well.
