episode twenty-three

episode twenty-three

If women of all ages freely embrace the term ‘romantic friendship,’ we will open up the space where we can develop primary bonds in platonic relationships that are constant, committed, and able to last a lifetime. These relationships ensure that the woman who does not find a perfect mate will still know true and abiding love. And at the end of the day it is this love that sustains us and gives life meaning

To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.

To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment. The real power of love is to transform us. The practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain.

To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.

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. While we will necessarily behave differently depending on the nature of a relationship , or have varying degrees of commitment, the values that inform our behavior, when rooted in a love ethic, are always the same for any interaction.

To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.

I think the artist, the creator, is acutely aware of their mortality more than most people. The itching human desire to spread your seed, leave behind a trail of your existence is one that plagues the artist, almost to the point of compulsion. Must write, must paint, must create, must create. The desire to put one’s life on paper and make it permanent acknowledges its precarious and ephemeral nature. The desire to make permanent that which is fleeting. When I write I am acutely aware that I am dying. With each word I march closer toward death and it makes me create with a feverish urgency. Forces me to filter those big, impossible clouds of emotion into lines and loops that speak a language I can share.

To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.

queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (though that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent, create and find a place to speak and thrive and to live”

To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.

Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, we have already witnessed the commodification of feminist thinking (just as we experience the commodification of blackness) in ways that make it seem as though one can partake of the “good” that these movements produce without any commitment to transformative politics and practice. In this capitalist culture, feminism and feminist theory are fast becoming a commodity that only the privileged can afford. This process of commodification is disrupted and subverted when as feminist activists we affirm our commitment to a politicized revolutionary feminist movement that has as its central agenda the transformation of society.

To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.

- bell hooks