I’m largely offline, unplugged, not at the computer this week and next and taking the liberty of re-stacking (sue me!), just because. this was originally published on feb. 26, 2024. still relevant.
don’t give up!
xo
kendall
i think a lot about how to love other people well. a lot of what i’ve been taught about love is actually about control, ownership, obligation, rescue, and domination—at least in white supremacist capitalist culture. happy valentines day xo!
luckily, a lot of people share my longing to love people well, and have talked, written, made projects, and sung about it. recently i heard writer Kristiana Rae Colon describe love as the will to nurture, which has stayed with me; as in, to love is to care about someone’s ultimate good, aspirations, wellbeing.
this Henry Miller quote struck me recently, because it goes against what i feel like i’ve been taught about love:
“One has to permit people to become desperate, to become wholly lost, that only then are they ready for the right word, only then can they avail themselves of the truth. To withhold it then is a crime. But to nurse them along is a worse crime. And there is where much of the conflict centers, about that point. The human instinct to spare the other person his agony (which is his means of salvation, in any sense of the word) is a fallacious instinct. Here the subtle temptations, the vicious and insidious ones, because so confused and entangled, enter in. On this so-called human plane it is the ego which commands — often in the most amazing disguises. The temptation to be good, to do good, gets us all some time or other. It’s the last ruse, I feel, of the ego.”1
permitting people to become desperate does not sound like a pretty picture, it actually sounds kind of scary. but trying to rescue people, i think, is even more sinister — to the degree that it prevents them from learning or getting what they need. emotional rescue, at least, is about bending reality to our will, it’s about manipulation and control. Mia Birdsong writes about this, “Sitting with the grief and pain of other people can be so hard. I often find it uncomfortable to just listen and watch a loved one in distress. I want to fix, I want to advise…….So my efforts to soothe are partly about not having to feel bad alongside someone else.”2 i think love asks us to feel pain all the way through instead of avoiding it, to be there with people in their pain all the way through instead of trying to fix shit. when we feel things all the way through maybe the “solutions” or next steps become clear, become bright.
on this talk, Connecting Personal and Social Change, Alta Starr talks about somatic centering as “being in a practice of truly accepting what is. We’re ending our war with reality that’s what this practice is, which is actually usually a war with ourselves that we then just turn external. Noticing and saying yes to what is, first step.”3 the fixing, the avoiding, the rescuing, the controlling, these are war tactics.
i’ve been at war with my own reality, especially the unsavory, the embarrassing, the painful, what’s out of my control. i’ve been at war with yours too. life is very bewildering. and, other choices are possible, with courage, with gusto.
the white flag is billowing in the wind.