Love
I love love. And love is a practice we can always be better at.
“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.”
Romantic Love
Formative books:
All About Love - on love as a verb, as an antidote to nihilism and patriarchy, and the role of love in community.
The Course of Love
Art of Loving - “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” Most people think their problem is not being loved, but their real problem is their ability to love. Love is an artful practice, a choice that we make, and give to others and yourself.
Esther Perel - anything she writes and speaks on, but here are two good starting places: rethinking infidelity and desire in long-term relationship
“ I’ve heard that said a lot, “Don’t love nuthin’, save it.” You see, that was one of the devastating things, I think, in the experience of black people in this country, was the effort to prevent that, the full expression of their love. And that sentiment that Ella has, is conservative, if you want to hang on to your sanity, hang on to yourself, don’t love anything, it’ll hurt. And of course, that’s true, not just of African Americans, it’s true of all sorts of people. It’s so risky. People don’t want to get hurt. They don’t want to be left. They don’t want to be abandoned, you see. It’s though love is always some present you’re given to somebody else. And it’s really a present you’re giving yourself.”
Love is not always, or only, found in families of origin and romantic couplings.
“Justice is what love looks like public.”
Community Love
How can we create a new social fabric not based on exploitation and inequity, but sharing and collective liberation?
Nuclear Family
Anti-library
“In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
“What if our collective currency was to care for each other?”