Each year the CFC spends the month of February doing some love talk and this year I want to set it off by sharing a few of my thoughts on love praxis.
A little background: I have been in a committed relationship for nearly 14 years, married for 9 years. I am still close to besties from preschool and 5th grade. I have a beautiful child, come from a big family, and I am part of large community of loving folks.
I think about love in three ways: in-love, love, and loving (not mutually exclusive). I believe that being in-love is an irrational state of being, that love is an ideology, and loving is a deliberate action.
Being in-love is like brownie a la mode or July watermelon slurping. It’s yummy and risky; a time when we ignore the annoying fact of having to wash a gooey chocolate plate or having sticky fingers and stained clothes.
Being in-love is like waves or frequencies, sometimes you are in and other times you are trying to be in or avoiding it all together. It can be addictive, it can be good, but it can also be toxic and all-consuming.
Love is like temperature; there are degrees.
Sometimes you are warm with others and cold with yourself.
Sometimes you are 80 degree radiating sunshine touching people you will never know. This is when justice is possible.
Sometimes people are so hot with self love no one dares touch them. They are not for touching, just staring. These people burn just about everything they get close to. This is greed.
Many take their warmth and light on tour; they share their warmth with those in the shadows so that others may see their humanity. This is solidarity. This is loving.
As we kick off our month of love talk and black history month here at the CFC we hope you will share with us your stories of being in-love, love ideologies, and loving practices. Right now I’m in-love with Nina Simone’s Tribute to Langston Hughes “Backlash Blues so I’m gonna share it with you.
Be loving, radiate love, and enjoy the sticky fingers if you dare.
The loving of deliberate action makes me think of Coates’s “A Muscular Empathy” piece: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/
That we have to ask ourselves to be curious about the thinking and actions of people we see as distant from us.
thank you so much for sharing that article because it’s absolutely brilliant. 🙂
I agree. Coates’s piece poses an essential question “why wouldn’t I be exceptional if the circumstances were difficult.” Moving beyond our comfort zones is a deliberate action; it takes work–indeed muscle. The heart is the most important muscle.