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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Valarie Kaur
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May 26, 2023 - August 10, 2025
Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. Love as labor can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love. “Revolutionary love” is the choice to labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It begins with wonder: You are a part of me I do not yet know. It is not a formal
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“What is higher than truth?” Papa Ji would ask me. “Living the truth,” I answered. “Changa,” he said. “Good.” “Truth is high, but higher still is truthful living,”
What does it take to reclaim wonder now after so much trauma and devastation?
Grief is the price of love.
Grief has no end really. There is no fixing it, only bearing it.
When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.
You don’t need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them.
Any act to change the world around us begins within us. It starts with a sense of agency, a sense that we have the power to effect change.
When you love someone, you fight to protect them when they are in harm’s way. If you “see no stranger” and choose to love all people, then you must fight for anyone who is suffering from the harm of injustice. This was the path of the warrior-sage: The warrior fights, the sage loves. Revolutionary love.
We cannot fight on multiple fronts alone and last. We need allies in our lives, and in our movements, who wonder, grieve, and fight with us and for us. Perhaps a better word is “accomplices,” a term invoked by indigenous leaders. We need accomplices who will conspire with us to break rules in order to break chains,
What does it mean to be a warrior-sage for a new time? Who will you fight for? What will you risk? It begins with honoring the fight impulse in you.
The opposite of love is not rage. The opposite of love is indifference. Love engages all our emotions: Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects that which is loved. We cannot access the depth of loving ourselves or others without our rage.
Listening does not grant the other side legitimacy. It grants them humanity—and preserves our own.
How do we make peace with beloved ones who become ghosts? The secret is to understand that our relationship with them has not ended even though they are gone.
love that outlasts life.
I heard a deeper longing—for a future where we were all safe and secure in our bodies, free to pursue our dreams, where our social, political, and economic institutions supported not just our survival but our flourishing. We could resist with all our might and never deliver such a future. We needed to do more than resist. We needed to reimagine the world.
Our meetings turned into rituals. We lit candles, opened journals, and took turns asking each other questions: What are you grateful for? Why are you here? What changes are you ready to make to stay true to yourself?
Nearly every day someone was on my couch, working through their tears or fears. Soon my little apartment on Lynwood Place became a meeting space outside the law school, a place to rage and listen and reimagine the law and ourselves in it.
We do not need religion to imagine the world we want. But we do need more spaces to imagine and wisdom about how to do it.
“The way we make change is just as important as the change we make!”
We needed to support reforms, but we could reform endlessly and still not get the world we wanted. It was time to imagine more boldly and bravely than ever before.
every unjust social institution in history seemed permanent until it was imagined otherwise.
This is our moment to declare what is obsolete, what can be reformed, and what must be reimagined.
Marriage was a social and legal institution that had cast women as property and cemented traditional gender roles for centuries.
If we could make the wedding our own, then we could make marriage ours, too. We asked ourselves: When had we felt most at home in our bodies and at home in the world? What were the elements that made us feel that way? We wrote and dreamed and toasted and planned.
We create the beloved community by being in beloved community.
“The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory,”
I saw the practices of revolutionary love at work—we wondered, grieved, and fought; we raged, listened, and reimagined the future. All of this was anchored in breath.
Breathing is life-giving. In every breath, we take oxygen into our bodies to nourish and sustain us. We inhale the molecules we need; we exhale what we do not need. Breath is constant: Its rhythm moves within us whether or not we are aware of it. Buddhist, Hindu, and many other wisdom traditions have taught conscious breathwork for centuries: When we pay attention to our breath, our minds are called to the present moment. Not the past, not the future. Here and now. Inhale. Exhale. Breathing creates space and time to be present. Present to emotion. Present to sensation. Present to surroundings.
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Breathing creates space in our lives to think and see differently, enliven our imagination, awaken to pleasure, move toward freedom, and let joy in.
“We may not live to see the fruits of our labor in our lifetime,” Amar said to me, “but we labor anyway.”
For a fleeting moment, these young men wanted to find the white power group that radicalized Page and exact revenge. But that impulse had receded. They were surrounded by sangat—community—and breathing as one. They were breathing through guilt and rage and grief and letting breath anchor them. “I don’t think much about the gunman anymore,” Kamal later declared. “Our community is not about retaliation, just love.”
We didn’t need simply to be known. We needed to be loved.
how to grieve together, how to breathe through hate and violence together, how to practice love together.
We gazed up at the words etched into the monument of Dr. King: Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. Harpreet said, “I feel my mom is still watching over us. That’s what made today happen.”
This was not about the future at all. This was about a state of being in the present moment, as if now is all there is. Now and now and now. It is moving from Moment with a capital M to Moment with a capital M. This is a state of joyfulness inside the struggle—an energy that keeps us in motion, a breathing that keeps us laboring, even inside the pain of labor. Hope is a feeling that waxes and wanes, sometimes brilliant and luminous, sometimes a faint sliver in the sky, sometimes gone completely. No matter how hopeful or hopeless we feel, we can choose to return to the labor anyway. Sometimes
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ever-rising spirits even in darkness, joy even in struggle—one breath at a time.
That is our defiance—to practice love even in hopelessness. And to show you. So that you might take our hand, and love us, too.
“The way we make change is just as important as the change we make.”
You don’t have to make yourself suffer in order to serve. You don’t have to grind your bones into the ground. You don’t have to cut your life up into pieces and give yourself away until there is nothing left. You belong to a community and a broader movement. Your life has value. We need you alive. We need you to last. You will not last if you are not breathing.
No matter what is happening out there in the world right now—no matter how dark or violent or cruel—this beautiful thing also exists. The world right here is just as real as the world out there. Take another deep breath. Notice how it’s a little easier. Now—who can share this beautiful thing with you? “When we see something that beautiful, we call it breathtaking, but we really should call it breathgiving,”
“Because when suffering constricts the heart, awe stretches it back out, making us more compassionate, more loving, more present.”
Perhaps it is time to shift the terms from “self-love” to “loving ourselves.”
The term “self-care” implies that caring for ourselves is a private, individual act, that we need only to detach ourselves from our web of relations and spend our resources on respite or pampering. But Melissa reminds us that care is labor that we all do for one another, in seen and unseen ways.
there is no shame in reaching for each other and insists the imperative rests not with the individual, but with the community. Our job is to have each other’s back.”
“What is the life you want for every person on this earth?” my mother asked me. “Um, let’s see, safety, shelter, food, water, healthcare, education, and…” “And time with the people they love,” she said.
I remembered my mother’s instruction: to allow myself the pleasures I wanted for everyone on earth. My gratitude returned me to the present moment. Each place expanded the aperture of what I could see and therefore how much I could breathe in, and with each breath, I was learning how to love my body and its place among things—the wide wet earth, the sweep of human civilization, the kingdom of animals, the timeline of evolution, and the stars in the universe. I was accessing the force of life within me.
The earth is organized by violence—the routine termination of life, the bloody killing of creatures who think and feel and have societies of their own. The earth is also organized by labors of love.
In these gestures, there was an impossible love—a wellspring that resided in us, too.
