Valentine's Day is upon us here in America, complete with the red-pink-white monotony of cards, gifts, and chocolates lining stores across the country.
One of my earliest memories of this day takes place at the end of my middle school lunch hour. I was an intense introvert then, and completely socially irrelevant. As the bell rang for the next period, I found myself being teased by a group of boys, the leader of which had extended to me a carnation, given to him and all the boys in school by the misguided student body leadership class of 1998-1999, only for him to snatch it away just after I reached out, with a gleeful 'Sike!', backed by a chorus of mid-pubescent boyish laughter.
I've been ambivalent about this day since.
I think of that moment often, even outside of the mad rush for Valentine's Day, and it comes to mind again as I walk through any store in Los Angeles. This day is supposed to be about love, a vibrant, living thing that shouldn't be able to be quantified, much less purchased. But, as I walk through the pink and red aisles of a drugstore or department store, and overhear teenaged girls giggling about what they're getting their boyfriends, or watch, with amusement, as men stand in shock in front of a display of assorted chocolates and candies, I wonder about what kind of love we're really trading with on Valentine's Day. It's as if in the desire to fill our lives with love, this day creates lack as a byproduct of events and gestures that are supposed to prove to a singular lover that you do, indeed love them, and here are the chocolates, cards, teddy bears, candies, dinners, flowers to prove it. All things. All dead or dying on arrival.
What does love look like in 2017 when the world is getting louder and pressing closer on our sense of self and worth? I find myself thinking about this often, as often as I have updated my social media statuses with, "You are surrounded by love." Even then, I'm a little bit doubtful of what that love is, what it needs to be for us to make it through this year with our spirits, minds, and bodies healthy and whole.
We are taught, through media, only two types of love: one of duty, either to family or nation, and the other of romance. If you are like me and you've attended all your Sunday School courses diligently, you probably know of at least one other kind of love: agape. But take a moment to think this through with me. What do you understand love to be? How did you learn to love? Did you learn to love? Would you recognize love if you passed it in the streets?
If you ask ten different people what they think that kind of love looks like, you'll get a hundred different answers. As you should. Love, as I know it, is uncontainable by language, existing beyond and between our perception, at the same time. It's a contradiction, giving strength to the weak, and compelling the strong to surrender.
Love shows up without remarking on itself, as it must because it will pull you out of your comfort zone and shove you into the wilderness and whirlwind. And somehow, in those places, it gives you power to go one more round, to knock on one more door, as for one more signature, protect another boundary, stand up straighter, speak up louder. It's not a master or a judge. There's no tit for tat here. It doesn't require balance and often throws you off balance just you can find it again.
When the ground beneath us is shifting, we need more than feelings to hold us steady. This isn't to say our feelings are invalid. Quite the opposite. Our feelings are what's left behind from actions we take or what others around us take. And people's actions always betray what and whom they love, and what and whom they disdain. Take those actions for what they are, more true than the words that surround them, and move accordingly.
Lianna La Havas's throaty voice echoes in my mind as she sings in question, "Is your love big enough for what's to come?"
Is your love big enough...
As we travel deeper into 2017, I realize we need to double down on a love that gives and creates life. There is too much blood in our streets, and too much that has been taken by power, from our bodies, our land, our histories. I know you feel it. I know it clings to the back of your mind like a bad aftertaste. I know it races around your part of the world with no chill, like Lisa McCray said, "...it feels like evil has run amuck."
And yes, what a mess of things evil has made. But what opportunities for more radical love we have before us. In my formative years as a student organizer, I was taught over and over again that "the personal is political", and oppression at scale requires resistance from the roots. This feminist language comes to my mind every time I weigh the work we – as in Black humans and everyone who loves us – have done, are doing, and have yet to do. The work we *been* doing. It has always been rooted in generative, messy, life-giving, death-defying, rage-propelled, machete-wielding, gun-toting love.
...for what's to come?
For many, it seems like America descended into chaos just a few months ago. But this chaos is by design, and by that same design pockets in America have existed in one form of chaos or another for decades. America isn't unique or special in its chaos: it's just the loudest. Around the world, chaos is a way life. There is nothing remarkable about chaos except that it is the nature of the universe in which we exist, and the work you and I have been called to must continue alongside and because of that chaos.
In America, Donald Tr@mp has made targets of the most vulnerable people of our society, amplifying weapons of structural racism that have been tested on Black Americans for decades. In Cameroon, the government has cut off internet access to English speaking section of the country. In South Africa, Black students are still agitating and organizing against institutional racism within the halls of academia. In Nigeria, villages are slaughtered while the president is AWOL and the tanking economy drives up costs of living.
And yet, in every occupation, there is a formidable resistance moving and working together, in concert, for justice and freedom. There are people campaigning for causes like that of Bresha Meadows and Nigeria's Bring Back Our Girls. And while we may never be able to see all the tiny moments of love that snowball into grand events of change, it's important that we trust in the power of love.
When I look at the way Valentine's Day descends upon us, then look back to the love that built me, my tribe, and the movements for justice around us, I find Valentine's Day to be a poor copy of the real thing. It's too neat, too short-lived, too clean to be the messy, and sometimes violent kind of love that is necessary to survive in this dispensation of power. While I get that It Wasn't Always This Way, and I've read the many histories of the holiday, I still walk away from each one knowing that there exists a more potent love.
I've learned in my few years on this earth that love is best expressed in giving and receiving. You can tell how much someone loves something or someone else by how they give; and you can tell how much someone loves themselves by how well they receive. There is power in these motions, power that will root us through times of chaos and beyond.
Love happens in the spirit first as a decision or commitment to action, and is completed, confirmed, and amplified by the physical work. And when you're paying attention, you will see love at work every where you turn as small actions that without context, carry no meaning, but are in concert with a very powerful force.
We are literally, physically, tangibly surrounded by love. This isn't just some whoo-whoo thing I like to tweet. This is a true fact. Love is the first and last true thing, unending and sure. Look for it; it will not fail, even when everything else does collapse.
How do we move in that love in 2017 and beyond? Every day brings a fresh urgency to the importance of human connection. And, every day, love demands that we do the work, compelling us to show up in new ways for each other and for ourselves. It requires that we ask new and different questions and pay careful attention to how people and power are moving around us. Believe people by their actions and move accordingly.
You are surrounded by love, forever and always.