“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
—James A. Baldwin
I am noticing more love within me, emerging, changing everything. Not like some kind of soft hippie peace-and-love but the force of uprising, the love that says I must exist, the love that sees all as worthy of love, the love that unmasks us. If we can’t start with love then the whole exercise is useless.
Here we are in it, finding the others who can hold the love because they’ve been hollowed out by pain. Love that knows that as long as we are willing to overlook ongoing trauma and systems of dominance and violence, we aren’t loving ourselves, we are against love for ourselves or for anyone.
This is a love that doesn’t require perfection but doesn’t permit delusion. In this kind of love you lose everything, everything. It feels gut-wrenching and beautiful. This love is grief and possibility, unmeasurable. This love rips away all your defenses and shows you they were unnecessary, they were all made of lead, offering a sense of safety that slowly poisons your mind and body.
This is a love made of responsibility, of freedom, of belonging. Made for liberty. It’s not a love of humanity, it’s a love of being, of beings.
This is a love that sees no difference among us, and that celebrates our differences, that is not indifferent.
This love is the only weapon against tyranny and this love is not a weapon, not a defense, but a force that triumphs, or just creates a different reality altogether. It is larger than life and twice as natural.
It’s not in the slightest bit naive, it is the force that says ‘survive’ when we are hurt or broken. It might be supernatural and it might be just the air and rocks and trees, if you’re listening. It’s what exists before. What will take us to the after. It’s here, always. To feel it is to be swept by a river, a flow, bubbly and rushing through, left breathless.
This love is a chemical reaction, a consequence of collective practice, it is connected and emergent. This is a love with, and not just among. This love changes us, me, everything.
This love blasts out from our chests like a warrior goddess, takes us to a new place, returns us to ourselves.