All About Love: New Visions

by bell hooks

Love is as love does, and it is our responsibility to give children love. When we love children we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights. Without justice there can be no love.

intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are.

Sometimes children are fascinated by lying because they see the power it gives them over adults.

Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power, and females not only do the same but they also lie to pretend powerlessness.

Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense.

The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.

Using a working definition of love that tells us it is the action we take on behalf of our own or another’s spiritual growth provides us with a beginning blueprint for working on the issue of self-love. When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend them to ourselves.

One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel.

we can all enhance our capacity to live purposely by learning how to experience satisfaction in whatever work we do.

When we intentionally strive to make our homes places where we are ready to give and receive love, every object we place there enhances our well-being.

“Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”

When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit. We recognize divine spirit everywhere.

Spiritual practice does not need to be connected to organized religion in order to be meaningful. Some individuals find their sacred connection to life communing with the natural world and engaging in practices that honor life-sustaining ecosystems.

When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation.

In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.

Young progressives committed to social justice who had found it easy to maintain radical politics when they were living on the edge, on the outside, did not want to do the hard work of changing and reorganizing our existing system in ways that would affirm the values of peace and love, or democracy and justice. They fell into despair. And that despair made capitulation to the existing social order the only place of comfort.

We are among the richest nation on earth, yet we spend a trivial amount on our poor compared to that spent by every other Western industrialized nation. One fifth of America’s children live in poverty.

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Individuals with good intentions and kind hearts can be swept away by unprecedented access to power and privilege.

Since we choose our friends, many of us, from childhood on into our adulthood, have looked to friends for the care, respect, knowledge, and all-around nurturance of our growth that we did not find in the family.

friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.

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 reserved 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.

Whenever we heal family wounds, we strengthen community. Doing this, we engage in loving practice.