More Love

There's so much in the bell hooks' book I want to discuss. I kind of feel a little overwhelmed by all of the material. Nonetheless, let's try a post today. My last one was not one of the best I've ever written, so I hope I redeem myself a bit here.

The overwhelming aspect of trying to write about hooks' ideas is to pick which part to discuss that feels most relevant to me without going on and on about my greatest self-pity hits. How often can I bemoan the loneliness that fills most of my days or how I think that I'm an awful mom or the fear I'm currently feeling about this crush I have. I'll try to avoid those, but as I currently do not have a therapist, I make no promises.

Let's examine what it means to live by a "love ethic." The chapter starts off with "Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination." I have mentioned before that I am union president for my school district. We are currently in negotiations. Just yesterday, a trusted adviser told me that negotiations shouldn't be about power, but a conversation about solving problems. Once power becomes the language and goal of negotiations, both sides have lost. I really needed to hear those words as I had been a little down after the last negotiation session. Negotiations could be done with a love ethic and that's a goal I'm going to set for myself.

hooks writes "A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change." I think this is why I became a teacher. I had a very influential teacher in my life who saw the potential in me and expressed her belief in me. That's love. That's what I hope to do for my students, help them see their own worth and live in a manner that honors their worth. 

I also think this is why I wanted to be union president. In the chapter "Community: Loving Communion," hooks says "When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love." My aspiration for the local is that it becomes a cherished member of the community where we teach. That works to deepen our relationship with students and families and it gets us allies. Teachers have been vilified for the last 40 years, stronger relationships in the community can only help to straighten out the lies that have been oft-repeated. That can only help to further love in our world, because love can't live in the fog of lies and disinformation.

I think I'll stop here for today. There is one more section I want to address, but I'll save that for another day.

How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

 I'm thinking about the poem I wrote and shared the other day. Before I wrote that, love had been on my mind a lot lately. It still is.

Just before the Christmas break started, I stopped in at 27th Letter Books to look around. Someone had told me about the store in the summer. It's spacious and friendly with a great variety of books. As usual, I had no idea what I was looking for, I just knew that I was looking for something. I found a book by bell hooks (this is probably a week before she died) - all about love: New Visions. I had read essays by hooks, but none of her books, so I decided that I needed to change that. I bought the book, went home, and promptly devoured it.

It deserves a more thorough and mindful reading than I think I gave it. I plan on reading hooks' book one more time and discussing it here. No matter how quickly I read it, it really sparked something inside of me. It sparked a realization that I've probably been "loving" all wrong. My life-long version of love has probably been more lust, with me accepting the time someone spends in bed with me as, at least, affection.

The thing is, in general, no one teaches us about love. That's an idea that hooks mentions several times in her book. Some time in kindergarten, some weirdo relatives starting asking if you have a boyfriend/girlfriend. That's not an invitation to love, but it sure does shape our views on companionship. So much, that in my life, I continually choose someone just because he's willing to stick around for a while, insuring that I'm not physically alone for a bit.

Reading all about love took me to a little book I have by Thich Nhat Hanh called How to Love. It's a small book with big ideas about love.These are ideas I wished we openly and actively discussed instead of encouraging five-year olds to roam the playground, looking for romance. For example, Hanh suggests that there are four elements of true love: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. He states that, "if your love contains these elements, it will be healing and transforming."

Healing and transforming sound beautiful, so why don't we teach children how to cultivate those elements in all their relationships, romantic or not? Instead, we get to middle school with the caveat, "all kids get teased/bullied sometime."

At 54, I've become romantically invisible to men. That makes me feel quite sad, especially as I'm just learning about these concepts now. It would be great to put them to use. I can, of course, apply loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity to all relationships I have, which is a worthy endeavor. 

The big challenge will be to cultivate these elements toward myself and not just to others. I am worthy of compassion and joy and loving kindness and equanimity. I may not always believe it, but I am. We are all.