Sowing Love Value: Commitment
We are dedicated to embodying love with consistency regardless of circumstance.
We are living in a time that is challenging, chaotic, debilitating, and destabilizing, but one thing it should not be is confusing. For many years, humanity has allowed hate to be our guide. War, poverty, famine, genocide, and violence have been global atrocities that we have collectively normalized and been complicit in. Some capitalized on the suffering of others and many of us sat in silence as it happened. The people who worked tirelessly to show us a better way, we allowed to be demonized, and their works to be twisted and coopted in service of the greed of a select few. It only makes sense that we have arrived at a time where fascism reigns supreme and materiality controls and dictates how we govern, how we organize, and how we live.
But I believe that we have the ability to be something different. To behave better. To think better. To build relationship better. To love better. For me that does not include meeting hate with hate. It has been challenging to bear witness as kindhearted people who truly are concerned with the collective good, communicate in ways rooted in divisiveness. Those of us who are fighting for freedom and liberation cannot forget that our souls must be intact once we get there. As Audre Lorde taught us, we cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. It does not serve us to focus our energies on speaking and wishing ill over people rather than exposing their wrongdoings or directing our anger and frustrations at entire groups of people instead of individuals. Using the tactics of those lost in hate to further a loving agenda will always be a fight that we will not win. I am not suggesting that we do not speak or that we meet insincerity with sincerity, but I am suggesting that we remember that it is our duty to seek and speak truth. That can only be done from a place of love.
Love in its most liberatory form requires deep commitment. At Sowing Love, we define commitment as being dedicated to embodying love with consistency regardless of circumstance. We are intentional about “regardless of circumstance” because we are clear that circumstances can lead us to forget. In this time, we are being flooded with hateful rhetoric, thinking, and action. That has led many of us to be angry and exhausted. These are necessary, vital feelings that every person should have the space and time to feel and explore, but if you focus too long on your exhaustion or anger you can forget that you remain rooted. Somewhere in space and time we collectively remain held in loving arms–countless souls and energies willing us to remember who we are. To remember that anger is powerful, but only when we transform our anger into loving energy.
Those who are committed to hate want all of us to lose ourselves, to forget that we are intimately connected, and that the ties that bind us are greater than this moment in time. They don’t want us to see that we do ourselves a disservice when we forget that leading with love is the only way to disrupt, silence, and transform hate.
It is time for us to recommit ourselves to love. The love that so many freedom fighters before us called on to change hearts and minds, to build anew, and to energize and nourish themselves—mind, body, and soul. I have shared with many that these times have challenged my love practice, but my commitment to love remains. It remains because I have clear guides in my love practice. My guides are one of the greatest gifts that I have. They include family members–some who I knew intimately and others who I only know through stories told. Plants and other living beings in the natural world who are examples of how to live reciprocally and collaboratively. Many in the Black freedom tradition who I never knew but left seeds of love for me to pick up in books, speeches, community work, and the way they lived their life. All of us have guides. Part of your life’s work is to find yours. They will keep you anchored, help you to uncover the work you are intended to do, and can be examples of how to embody love.
Here are some seeds left from my guides that have kept me during this time:
“Remember we are not fighting for the freedom of Black people alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all of us.”
Ella Baker
“You may think that you have to combat evil and chase it out of your heart and mind. But this is wrong. The practice is to transform yourself. If you don’t have garbage, you have nothing to use in order to make compost. And if you have no compost, you have nothing to nourish the flower in you. You need the suffering, the afflictions in you. Since they are organic, you know that you can transform them and make good use of them.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
“As a nation we need to gather our collective courage and face that our society’s lovelessness is a wound. As we allow ourselves to acknowledge the pain of this wound, when it pierces our flesh and we feel in the depths of our soul a profound anguish of spirit, we come face to face with the possibility of conversion, of having a change of heart. In this way, recognition of the wound is a blessing because we are able to tend it, to care for the soul in ways that make us ready to receive the love that is promised.”
- bell hooks
“It may be the end of the world…but there are other worlds.”
Octavia Butler
“He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star.”
Dr. Benjamin Mays
If all of us are to get free, it is time that we remember that freedom has no limits–it remains accessible to all. Even those who are presently committed to hate, can return to love and find the freedom that all of us are intended to have. We must continue to hold space for anger and grief, but also work to understand the time we are in. It is my belief that each one of us chose this time. We chose to be here, to breathe life into this moment. Many of us sense, see, and feel that what we once knew is disappearing. While I would much prefer our collective transformation to be guided by complete care, it does not change the fact that what we had before was not loving. There were many who were not free and remain bound. There were many who suffered and whose suffering is being deepened. Globally, we have not known a time so liberated that any of us should want to return to it. It is time for another world, and we are here in this moment to help build it.
To build anything, we must start with preparation. To prepare is “to make ready for use.” We are the preparers–the people who are intended to work together in love to build a world that is ready to be caring, joyful and abundant. If done right, this time can be a gift. But only if we remember the heart of commitment–to embody something regardless of circumstance. The hateful circumstances we presently exist in are unnatural and a distraction that we can no longer afford. Let us remember who we are, what we have been called to do, and not be seduced into fueling hate and dissension. Let us instead meet hate with the truth–that all of us deserve to live well, that collectively we have all we need to get there, and that we have a responsibility to those who came before and those yet to be to remain committed to these truths.