🧵 | Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star - e.e. cummings
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so let's talk about love, big love, little love, old love, new love, and especially, what love can do for us now
Hi, friends,
First, thanks for last week’s Best Books thread. Wow is my TBR pile growing and I am thrilled.
Today, our topic is LOVE, because, well, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. And on Valentine’s Day, what I think of is not fancy dinners out or roses or rings. I think about a classroom filled with kids in footie pajamas and steam from the waffle maker swirling in shafts of sunlight through the giant paned windows. That’s because when I was an elementary teacher, we would celebrate Valentine’s Day in our classroom with a pajama and waffle party. And the students would snake their way through the rows of desks with their big bags of identical valentines (well, not identical because most often these were handmade), placing the cards one at a time on the desk of each classmate. Sometimes they would be sticky with syrup. By the time that disbursement was complete, each of them would again have a big pile of valentines to stuff back into their bags, eventually. But first they would spend the the rest of the morning poring over these treasures from their friends, inspecting and arranging these tokens of love.
Love.
It’s a powerful force. We know this, and we have all felt its power in our lives, and, I imagine, we have all, at one time or another, felt its lack. Babies, we are told, can die from lack of love, and at the very minimum, love deprivation will harm a baby’s physical, emotional, and mental development.
Human beings need love as much as food, water, or air. But far too often—and most especially on Valentine’s Day, the word love (and the concept of love) is narrowly relegated to romantic love.
What a pity, to reduce (and commercialize, of course) this vast and most powerful element of our lives to something so narrow and exclusive. Love is our life force. It is, as e.e. cummings says so beautifully, more first than sun, more last than star.
More first than sun, more last than star. I want a force that powerful in my heart right now, and in my hands.
I want a force that powerful in our collective hands, too. bell hooks said that love is profoundly political and that our deepest revolution will come when we know this truth. She also said, “the moment that we choose love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression…we begin to move towards freedom.”
So, let’s lean into the heart of love with a giant, open-to-all valentine thread, filled with:
Love stories of all kinds
Love notes to specific people, places, animals, friends, etc.
Love poems
Love quotes
Questions about love
Memories of love
And, of course, tales of Valentine memories , the good, the bad, the funny, etc.
Love of the earth
Anything else you have to say about love—make us smile, make us laugh, make us cry, make us want to share our own love story
In celebration of the collective power of love, and the truth that we need it now more than ever, this thread is open to all WITD members, paid and free—if you want to love on WITD with a paid membership or gift a subscription to someone you love, yay … meanwhile, I love you all. Please make your comments in the spirit of love only.
Well those sticky valentines had me getting misty-eyed. So much close to the surface right now. In light of what brings us to this space and to think of love in a very fundamental but universal way, I am thinking about that voice in our heads. The one that says something to us when we leave a public restroom with toilet paper on our shoe, the one that mutters about something you did in elementary school and that voice still cannot believe you brought THAT for show and tell. The voice that can tell you your writing sucks, that says - how could you even post that??? I really love George Saunders take that we really need to talk to ourselves the same way we would a friend we cared about. We would not talk to them like we do ourselves. To give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, like tbst friend. Instead of saying “ that sentence sucks so I suck, too,” saying, “ ha ha, you chucklehead, well maybe that sentence is kind of a hot mess, but that doesn’t mean you are. How can we make the sentence better, do you think?” If I can talk to myself this way, love myself this way, then I can get over the stuff that holds me back from showing up as more for myself, but also for those folks I really really love. So, to quote Bill Murray in Stripes, “ Lighten up, Francis.” That’s my valentine to myself, and all of us. Because this space has let me do that, take up space with tons of typos and weird leaps off the diving board that often end in loud belly flops. And one butt cheek hanging out of a bikini- but I digress. Again. I just feel like I have the biggest stack of valentines on the daily because of all of you. ❤️❤️❤️
One time when talking with a colleague that I was mentoring–now a friend, a friend for which I feel love–I said something that surprised me: “studying and teaching Sociology has been my spiritual path.” It was one of those “oh, I didn’t know I thought that” moments and the truth of it went all the way from my mouth and throat, down my chest, and into my pelvis, my seat, which was, at that moment, grounding me in a chair. When I go into the classroom–which I’m about to do, in 20 minutes–the reason I say that “sociology is another word for love” (thank you, Carvell Wallace) is because to me, teaching sociology is about getting people to see how much we need each other, how much we have to care for each other, how much we are interconnected, and how we need care, love, and compassion to not just be in our hearts, but in our daily interactions in the world (be kind to the parent with a crying baby on the plane and use your blinker, please!), in our culture (our language, or stories, our values), and in our social policies. We need it everywhere. EVERYWHERE. But of course, we happen to live in a country whose main story has been one of independence, of grit, of self-made-ness, of “I am a rock, I am an island, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries” kind of masculinity (my apologies for turning a beautiful song into the patriarchy). So we are swimming upstream, and so I use my time with my students to show them what love does for us every day and we don’t even know it. That banana you just ate? Someone in Guatemala, a person who bleeds, who aches, who laughs, picked that bunch off the tree by hand, and someone else inspected them, and someone else transported them, and someone else stocked them, all so that you can love yourself by providing yourself with nutrients, but all those other hands, they are just as much a part of that love as your family, and we have to figure out ways to protect all of us. EVERY ONE OF US, near and far. And now I have to go to class, and I look forward to joining in the conversation later today!