Love is an action.
Love is an action.
Welcome dear friends. This is my first newsletter post. Hello. For those I know well, thank you for being here. For those who I’ve never met, thank you for your curiosity.
Let’s start with a meditation to ground us in this present moment.
Breathing in, notice the area in front of your heart. Breathing out, notice the area behind your heart (your back). Keep your attention on your heart. Let your breath be natural. Set your timer for 2-5 minutes and just breathe in and out while focusing on your heart and the area in front of and behind your heart. When the bell rings, open your eyes and proceed.
I have been wanting to write to you for so long, but like so many of us, I’m tired. My plate is full. I’m trying to stay afloat, and I’m profoundly sad. But it is time. It is time.
Since 2018, I have taught a course called “How to Love: The Art and Science of Love and Intimacy” to majority undergraduates in their 20s and 30s. It has been one of the greatest joys of my life. This semester was unique. I was teaching the class online only for the first time ever so I could better attend to my health. I prepared and then gave a TEDx talk based on some of the content from the Love class in October. The talk, though not online yet, was all about suffering less by practicing perfect love. At the time I was preparing the talk, we were discussing generational trauma and how to deal with our triggers. This was a two-week lesson, and it all started right after Oct 7 when *Hamas killed 1200 Israelis and took another 240 people hostage. And then Israel began its US-funded and endorsed “war,” which then clearly became a genocide. Since then 17,400 people have been killed in Gaza, 46,000 are wounded, and as I write this, nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have been displaced. The borders to Israel and Egypt are closed, and people are literally trapped in the south (where they were originally told to go for safety) very likely to suffer even more than before. The Israeli government has cut off all humanitarian aid, again. People are starving to death, dying from infection, and many more will die from disease and hunger if the US-funded IOF doesn’t kill them first.
If you have been brave enough to look at the images from what has come out of Gaza in the last 2 months, I am sure you will agree that it is worse than anything you could possibly conjure up in your imagination. I have never seen anything more horrifying in any real or fictional image or video in my whole life.
Let’s pause here and take a few deep breaths to let those words meet the images we’ve seen (or maybe avoided) over the last two months.
As we learn in the love class from bell hooks, the Gottman’s, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others, love is an action. It means we have to water the seeds of love every day in ourselves and others to ensure its growth. Hooks calls us to live by a love ethic, and this was my final point in my TEDx talk.
“When we live by a love ethic, we make intentional choices to align our lives based on love and practice love with the people closest to us and extend it outward to those we will never meet.”
It may be easy enough (or not) to water the seeds of love in ourselves and our nearest and dearest. To water and nourish the seeds of love in ourselves and others is a lifetime practice. And it is a vital and essential practice if we want to create and sustain nourishing loving bonds with people in our life.
Outside of inner circle or family and friends, love is also an action that needs watering and nourishing. This reflects how we love people we will never meet, who live in countries we’ve never been to or maybe never even heard of. It refers to how we love those who don’t look like us, whose language we don’t share, whose culture is different, and whom may hold different faiths and traditions. If loving our friends and loved ones is sometimes or often hard, loving our neighbor may feel harder.
Yet, Love is what is needed now. We have collectively, both knowingly and ignorantly, been watering the seeds of violence, hatred, anger, selfishness, and greed since as long as I can see. We water it in seemingly small ways, like when we gossip or talk shit about another person who we don’t understand. We water the seeds of violence when we hit or yell at anyone. We water the seeds of violence when we name call. We water them when we shame and blame. When we lie, even a little. When we refuse to admit wrongdoing and refuse to apologize. We water the seeds when we act holier than thou. When only some people are deemed worthy. When we fail to walk a block, let alone a mile in another’s shoes. We water the seeds when we remove access to resources, when we steal, when we use force to take what we want. We water the seeds of violence when we occupy another’s land. We certainly water the seeds of violence when we bomb, shoot, kill, displace, injure, traumatize, starve, separate, orphan children, and wreck their lives. We water the seeds of violence when we don’t allow other people the same life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and basic human rights that we claim to believe in.
There is evidence of our violent seed watering in every historical account of humankind since our inception. Of course, we have also been watering the seeds of love, joy, community, connection, and peace. And thankfully, yes, there is also evidence of our loving seed watering in every historical account of humankind since our inception.
What we water grows. When on a world scale, we see the level of violence we are seeing in Gaza right now, it is clear we watered violence far more than we have watered love, peace, cooperation, and de-escalation. Peace has been unattainable because we have been watering the wrong seeds. And by we, I do mean you, me, and us (most specifically our US government, “leaders,” and policymakers).
I want you to imagine for a moment a world in which we were watering the seeds of love and peace. Watering the seeds of peace, means first, we stop the killing. In Gaza, it means an immediate and permanent CEASEFIRE. Sadly, as I write this, on 12/8/23, the US just voted “no” to a CEASEFIRE proposed by the United Nations.
Let’s just take another breath to let that sink in. Our US government and our UN representative said “no” to CEASEFIRE which means they say “yes” to genocide. Let’s feel the pain of that “no” and what “no” to CEASEFIRE actually means for the dying, starving, wounded, sick, terrified, displaced babies, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, siblings, uncles, aunties, cousins, grandmas, grandpas, friends, and neighbors. I think we all know what it means. More killing. Much more suffering. Much more generational trauma. Less love.
Breathe in the pain and suffering. Breathe out tenderness. Breathe in despair. Breathe out tenderness. Breathe in hopelessness. Breathe out hope.
Watering the seeds of love also means letting in all necessary humanitarian aid to care for the people who are dying and suffering from this genocide in action. Love means a Free Palestine! It means releasing all of those held captive by both Israel and Hamas. Love as an action means putting into action the UN resolutions that have been carefully crafted for decades to water the seeds of peace between Palestine and Israel. It means bringing those most impacted by these atrocities to the table to make decisions about how to move forward. Women in Palestine and Israel have been working together on peaceful solutions for decades. Their work needs to be amplified and supported. We need women at the helm co-creating a loving reality. We need to invite those who have been disproportionately impacted to come together and be the leaders of a new future that centers love, respect, dignity, human rights, freedom, safety, compassion, care, and peace.
The US, which consists of us, has a pivotal and essential role to play. We can lead with love or we can lead with violence. It can be as simple as that. Love by the way—is the harder action because right now, to be loving means to act with love. Love means action. It means we have to do something to water the seeds of love for those who are in need of it most.
Let us lead with love. Let us call on our courage to act in alignment with a love ethic—that holds love as our essential value.
We can turn this tide. We can lead with love. We can and we must. Please join me.
*Please note, I do not take this attack out of context, and while at the time, I did not know the history, I learned a lot since then about the brutal occupation that Israel has maintained through violence and apartheid. I have also learned about settler colonialism and the illegal occupation and expansion in Palestine that has been going on for nearly 100 years at the cost of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives. I am learning ever more daily and have become deeply committed to stopping genocide and freeing Palestine through nonviolent action. Some of the talks that have educated me: