Fear Can’t Survive a Radical Love Ethic

Our mission, vision and values keep us possible

bell hooks in New York City in 1992. Photo: James Keyser. Image descrition: bell hooks is lit by an overhead light as she crosses her hands at her chest and the blue-ish purple light and New York City skyline becomes the background.

Queer Entanglement

“The underlying values of a culture and its ethics shape and inform the way we speak and act. A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives our society would need to embrace change.” 

— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, “Values: Living By a Love Ethic”, pg. 87 

I was politicized on the subway. That temporal tube rushing through black portals, encasing a social sausage of flesh and sensoria…smell, sound, song…shuttling me between the past, present and future. I spent my freshman year of college in New York City, my dorm was on 92nd street and I was at the Schomburg at a frequency that felt quotidian. I was politicized while scrolling on Tumblr, breaking open every belief I swallowed from the mouths of parents and teachers that didn’t know any better. I was politicized while reading Woman, Race and Class¹ on the subway, in my dorm, at the Schomburg, tumbling between rage and recognition. The violent cosmic commute of the ship, rushing through black portals, encasing a social sausage of flesh and sensoria…smell, sound, song…shuttling me between the past, present and future, made me queer before I was born. An entanglement woven into the interface of my flesh offered alternative instructions for living. This way of being binds me to you, a social soldering so secure and complete, to sever the bond would require self-harm.

Running Towards a Radical Love 

“Individuals who choose to love can and do alter our lives in ways that honor the primacy of a love ethic. We do this by choosing to work with individuals we admire and respect; by committing to give our all to relationships; by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet.”

— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, “Values: Living By a Love Ethic”, pg. 87-88

During the freshman era of my politicization, between 2011-2012, I dismissed love as too flimsy a word. Too cheap, too thin, too palatable. Capitalism had sunk its teeth in it long ago and a word used in most marketing copy across all industries would never suffice, I thought. But as the years rolled on inside my practice of refusing to look away I found fresh ways the world would break my heart almost everyday and fear began to take hold. Anxiety would flow into depression like spring flows into summer and I became so skilled at running away from myself, running away from you. Self-isolation and its whispering myth of safety wrapped me in a blanket of inaction that felt oppressive but protective. My fear felt connected to my survival. To be seen by others would mean I could be criticized and abandoned by others, a reality the heartbroken 7 year old girl still living inside my body refused to bear. Where do you go when vulnerability feels like an unacceptable risk? After almost a decade of running from my fear, I realized the only place you can go to lose fear’s scent is to run towards it. 

For most of my adult life, fear was the most powerful force I’d ever known. It wasn’t until I surrendered and ran toward radical love, falling into the web of entanglement, trusting you to catch me, that I met a force beyond fear, beyond power, beyond language. Suddenly love wasn’t just a word, it was a principle of possibility, a mandate for living that I could sustain amidst the collective grief. Living by the primacy of a love ethic, allowing myself to be seen by others, feels like baptism and accountability is welcomed like rain after the drought. Instead of running away from accountability, we run to its shore to bathe in it. While wading in these healing waters, we enter spaces of collaboration, collective imagination and generative conflict with gratitude — trusting it won’t completely break us — because it’s here and only here that the seven year old girl remembers she loves to swim.

Can I Love You For Life?

“Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.”

— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, “Values: Living By a Love Ethic”, pg. 101

“Ever New” by Beverly Glenn-Copeland soaks the background and we remember our values are a map for our journey towards love.

What might we do now to make sure we’re not asking ourselves “what should I do?” in the wake of every collective catastrophe? This political moment genuinely feels different, like a true portal is opening up on a global level, but so did 2020. I don’t know about you, but 2020 changed my life, it was the catalyst that set me running toward a radical love ethic. I have no doubt this genocide is doing the same, I feel more committed to my politics, my values and the promise of community than I ever have. I also have no doubt another global catastrophe will renew these commitments in another 3 years. I want to be clear, nihilism, despair, and apathy aren’t options inside my love ethic — this isn’t about pessimism it’s about preparation. 

I want to become skilled at holding my gaze, my rage, and my love over a lifetime. My art will forever be an altar for transmuting grief but there are other ruttiers I've relied on over the years for navigating the sometimes wild and relentless waters of love. Inside my practice, I’ve maintained the habit of drafting and returning to mission and vision statements that are anchored by a set of values. My organizing principles for not drowning. When the world breaks our heart anew, we do not scramble and ask the wind what shall we do? We dive deeper, tune in and listen for our collective demands, then return to our love ethic and swim.

Values as Love Technologies 

As capitalism lulls us back into the status quo, with its lullaby of “business as usual”. May we draft our own mission and vision statements to return to as we make liberation an everyday practice. May we meditate on our map, a set of values that animates our actions, welcomes accountability, and attracts other “bearers of light”. Bearers of light forced to bear entirely too much darkness as scared settler forces occupying Palestine, currently running from their own traumas of childhood, insist on using fear, bombs, hunger, thirst, white phosphorus, death, displacement and genocide as “war strategy”. As if this is a war, as if there is anything worth “winning” after this, as if respect could be possible in the aftermath, as if a return to the status quo could be a “solution”. I turn on the radio and the mouths that know no better reiterate the violent settler’s goal of deposing Hamas, then circle the question: “But then who's going to govern the Palestinian people?” I turn off the radio and reflect on how the way they insist on missing the entire point would terrify me into despondence if I wasn’t rooted in values that insist on a love ethic. 

It’s Week 4 in the Seed A World Retreat and inside this week we focus on developing our own mission, vision and set of values activating our creative practices; remembering our values are technologies of accountability, attraction and action. There are a lot of new folks who said “yes” to this newsletter so I wanted to take this moment to share the Seeda School mission, vision and values animating my love ethic.

Mission

To empower communities of interdisciplinary artists making revolution irresistible through worldbuilding.

Vision

An ecosystem of abundantly resourced creative practices of queer, trans, black, indigenous, people of color (QTBIPOC), disabled, gender-nonconforming, low-income, survivors, and all other oppressed people so we may imagine and build the worlds we need and desire in the present.

Values 

1. Cultural Transformation: We’re not interested in diversity and inclusion agendas that uphold the status quo. We’re interested in a fundamental re-imagining and transformation of power distribution.

2. Black Feminist Praxis: We remember Black Feminism is a politic not a demographic². We center Black Feminist values as seed data and/or soil to root the worlds we’re building inside of.

3. Cooperative Creation: We invite generative conflict and prioritize emergent, fractal, collective authorship in order to adapt out of learned impulses favoring individualism, competition, neo-liberalism, colonialism and white supremacist capitalist patriarchal ways of working and learning.

4. Spirit First: We are spirit led and we work in alignment with the pace of our bodies and seasons. If our bodies are in the room, so is the need for consistent rest, ease, joy, spiritual care and time-space to grieve.

5. Sankofa Center: We are committed to the ancestral practice of remembering the past to build a future that prioritizes life. We build to honor and remember people we’ve never met, dead and not yet born.

6. We Refuse Techno-Determinism: We acknowledge the digital tools containing coltan, that we use everyday, have the blood of violent globalization embedded into them. We remember the future we need may have nothing to do with 21st century software and hardware.

7. Indigenous Interdisciplinarity: We remember de-colonial futures require interdisciplinary practice. We prioritize unlearning colonial conceptions of “human being” while learning from indigenous ways of being as we imagine and rehearse³ new worlds. 

Thank you for swimming with me.

With love,

Ayana

1. Women, Race and Class is a 1981 book by the American academic and author Angela Davis. It contains Marxist feminist analysis of gender, race and class. The third book written by Davis, it covers U.S. history from the slave trade and abolitionism movements to the women's liberation movements which began in the 1960s. Source: Wikipedia

2. ““Black feminism” and “Black feminist” are describing a politic not a demographic. Black feminists know about what is required for liberation at the margins and the intersections.” — Quirc App Instagram post. June 17, 2023.

3. McKittrick, Katherine. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Just Told Us: Abolition Is Presence, It Is Life in Rehearsal. It Is Not the Recitation of Rules. Freedom Is a Place. Freedom Is a Place. Guys. Get into It!” Twitter, 26 Oct. 2020, https://twitter.com/demonicground/status/1320862580039143433?lang=en