In All About Love, bell hooks takes her readers on a deeply felt journey into the heart of what it means to be a human who feels love. She digs through book after book about relationships and love to find definitions, perceptions, examples and possibilities for love in and out of relationships. It is not an easy journey to take, and it is not certain what will await us at the end. Her language is conversational and intimate, providing a kind of linguistic safe space for when the words come perilously close.
What is it to love as a verb rather than as a noun? What is it to look at the relationships in our lives and stop saying love where there is none? How does love love? Where is it, how is it, what does it bring to our lives at home and in the world? This book is a call to live in love actively and deliberately. hooks offers a challenge that is not about winning, rather about shifting perspectives and with them our lives.
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| Valentine's Day gets an upgrade. |
I was introduced to this book by a co-worker over Valentine's Day one year as part of our Staff Pick display.
Loving relationships, particularly long-lasting ones, are complicated and living. Some of them need lots of thick and dense time and emotion to maintain, and some are less high-energy, though no less important or honest. Friendship is, to me, the bedrock of all loving relationships outside of family (although there is a ton of overlap), so deep contemplation of what that means is welcome.
It turns out that I'm deeply romantic, which does not translate easily as a consciously single person with extremely intense friendships. It's not impossible or improbable or anything, but it's not normalized, so it's not normal. Spending time pondering questions like "What does it mean to do my dishes in a loving way?" is not regular for many people, and yet the question is asked and it remains because every now and then I need reminding of it.
bell hooks is a writer whose work I came to unpardonably late. She asks questions that are frequently found floating at the edges of patriarchal discourse but that whiteness finds uncomfortable, so doesn't ask. We all have that gateway author whose work opens up the library, the internet, the world to further research and possibility, and hooks is that writer for me. Specifically this book, which brought back work I'd begun years ago during a time of high stakes healing - which is usually when we start thinking about Love in our lives, no?
Thinking back on it reminds me of that shift - the one from noun to verb. It's a simple key change with drastic and marrow deep consequences.
Like the breaths on either side of falling in love.
#40days40book list
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