Glimpses of a Thing

Defining love is working to tame a wild thing, isn't it? I think it's why we use words like "wrangle," "pin down," and "harness" when trying to—forgive me—"capture" the meaning of something that feels at once so real and also so mysterious. But love is too holy a thing, too dripping, too messy and tangled and ducking a bit too fast behind the nearest tree. Where it is, and even—most painfully—where it isn't, language is limited. Language can only capture the shadow of a thing. This is why talking about love is always most easily done poetically. "Love is like," or "Love is a wolf." When we're lucky and the moonlight hits it just right, we catch a glimpse. "Love is a plant in spring"—both mundane and miracle. "Love is a bush on fire." Or, love is "I am." Like Moses asking to encounter God, we are only ever able to see where love just was and to proclaim it when it happens. Metaphors help.

So, for me, the goal isn't to get it, exactly. In fact, "getting it" would probably kill its essence, which is—again—wild. Instead, when I think of love, I hear the word "yes." Someone says, "This is love," and I think, "Yes, that is it." Online, a week later, I see someone detail how a friend showed up to help in a time of grief and I understand, "That is it. Yes, that is love." The joy, then, is in mulling it over, being witness to it, practicing it, talking about it, living it, pursuing it, having it pursue you, celebrating when it appears at our doorstep, being gentle with ourselves when it never arrives or is taken suddenly away, and watching it unfold before us when we're in its presence. Or maybe more accurately, the joy is in chewing it over.

I say this because a conversation about love, to me, is a conversation about food, about what nourishes us. It is a conversation, ultimately, about our relationship to the land—a conversation about our wildest resources and how our incredibly successful attempts to tame the land have depleted it, our bodies, and our relationships of utterly vital nutrients. 

Here's what I mean.

When a culture holds certain values as primary above everything else, those values seep through absolutely everything. So what I want to say has less to do with how I see that our collective (dis)connection from land has affected how we love, or how the way we love has affected our relationship to the land. Instead, I see connections between these things because our dominant culture holds certain values most dear. In other words, these values allow me to make connections between what might seem like disparate concepts (land and love) because our values have affected—and infected—both. 

And as someone who identifies as queer, I feel like at least part of that identity carries a responsibility to not only ask questions of these "normal" or "status quo" values but to ask increasingly better questions. What that looks like for me today is asking how we can be about the business of cultivating "nutrient-dense" love, a love that is desperately missing for so many of us—love that no longer "leave[s] the spirit hungry while the belly is full" (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 31)—or an "erotic" love—love that "makes our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible" (Lorde, 1984, p. 55). 

Love As

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer envisions a "restoration ecology" to do this kind of healing work. She suggests that we move away from Land as Capital, Land as Property, and Land as Machine. Fittingly, I think this is a great framework for how industrialist society currently views love, as well.

Love as Capital and Commodity
We ask, "What does this profit me?" rather than, "What access, support, and care does having love—romantic, in particular—grant me that others aren't afforded?"; or, "What can we mutually create here?"; or even, "How can I share love so that whole communities are sustained?" In love as capital, we're also in a "state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide for ourselves" (Berry, 2002, p. 85). We have been taught to rely on external love and validation rather than being nourished solely by resources we already have within us—love as an export, really. And, waste is seen as an acceptable part of the system rather than a breakdown of the system. People can be cut out and forgotten just as we have done to the land. Values of efficiency, convenience, and productivity have also superseded our individual and collective pleasure or joy. We currently ask, "What kind of love makes me most valuable to the system?" rather than "What kind of love(s) bring me the most joy?" 

Love as Property
Love is privatized, just like land. Love is “scarce” just as land is scarce. It does not belong to the commons, but to the lucky few who meet only the right criteria, determined by the market—if we’re honest, usually the individuals who cause the least disturbance. Not the sick or the elderly or the disabled or the oddballs or the freaks. We ask, "How much love can I gather for myself?" and "How can I own and control this person's love?" rather than "How much love do I have to give?" or “How can I share the abundance I already have?” As Andreas Weber says in Matter & Desire, "Our stubborn insistence on the private enjoyment of a fulfilling relationship is, deep down, an ecological tragedy. For the idea of love as a resource that I need other people to give me reflects the view that the whole living world is a battleground of bounded estates and that evolution is the story of victors in a race toward optimization. This fits together with the idea that nothing is given—which is why you have to increase your market value (usually by increasing your physical attractiveness) in order to be loveable" (2013, p. 9). 

Love as Machine
We are parts broken down to serve specialized purposes. The heart is a pump. Marriage is an economic endeavor or a tool of assimilation. We are out of sync with our own natural rhythms and the rhythms of nature. We are powered on at all times. We can be up whenever, eat whatever, and do whatever at any time of day, in any season. We value constant access to each other, to resources that deplete the planet, and to our inboxes over rest, renewal, and space. We must be dating or married at all times in order to be seen as "normal." We ask, "How does disembodied love keep me safe?"—"How can living in my head keep me protected from any vulnerability?"—rather than, "What is love anyway, but the courage to lose everything and be joyful regardless?" (Kendra Kreuger) or "What do proper seasons of love look like?” or “How might death of love be part of the process? Where might death create richer, healthier soil where other love might grow?"

A Restoration Ecology for Love

But, if we can apply restoration ecology to love, as Kimmerer suggests toward land, we can begin to look at [Love] as teacher, [Love] as healer, [Love] as responsibility, [Love] as sustainer, [Love] as identity, [Love] as grocery store and pharmacy (imagine it...love as food and medicine to our bodies!), [Love] as connection to ancestors, [Love] as moral obligation, [Love] as sacred, [Love] as self, and [Love] as home. 

As for me, I want mineral-rich loves. I want to know what it means to return nutrients to the soil, to our loves, and to our work. I want to know what food, relationships, and work make me more alive. I want to know what "more alive" looks like in practice and how we might collectively build more aliveness into our relationships. I want to know how to hold the land and our love in ways that don't tame them but instead encourage more dynamism, more freedom, more life. Or, how to co-create regenerative land. And, ultimately, how co-creating new life with land might help us build regenerative relationships. 

Loves Led Me Here

Most of all, I am grateful for and indebted to all the tour guides who have led me here and who continue to ask these questions—either in direct relationship or through indirect inspiration. I mentioned many of them here, but I must also include Asia Dorsey's mermaid-level brilliance; adrienne maree brown's work; Seth Siobhan O'Donovan's commitment to returning to the land and to doing meaningful work; Sarah Shavel's hospitality, magic elixirs, and her soul-healing child; Coby Wikselaar and the joy she gets discussing nearly everything; Kendra Kreuger's science-y/art-y genius and the rest of the initial social-permaculture crew; Rob Bell, who is always pushing for bass notes in a world full of treble; and, so, so many more.