What if love truly is 'work made visible'?
What if creating the conditions for love to flow through us, collectively, is the work we need to be doing right now?
Love if work made visible
Khalil Gibran
What if love is contagious? A question so rhetorical it almost feels wrong to end the sentence with a question mark. Unfortunately, our society has become so disconnected and self-centred that it’s lost on many that love indeed is contagious. It isn’t surprising that this question didn’t arrive as a question. It was a passing comment that might have floated by without anyone taking notice. But it crashed into me and was there to stay. What if Love is contagious? Those five words carry what the world needs without offering solutions or judgment. Initially, they weren’t framed as a hypothesis, an argument or even a question.. Because one can’t really question or argue that love is contagious, it simply is, just like kindness, tolerance and laughter. We can’t argue that she is, but we can forget.
Especially in an increasingly disconnected society, we can forget about the widespread bountiful borderlessness of love and, in the forgetting, we make way for hatred, intolerance, and xenophobia to spread like wildfire. Just like love, unfortunately, they are contagious. It feels as if we have normalised that humans are competitive, self-centred and violent. As if this is our innate way of being, not the consequence of billions of beings living misaligned, disconnected and traumatised lives. We are living in a sick society. A sickness both thriving because of and at the same time deepening, physical, emotional, and bioregional disconnection, untetheredness from land, sacredness, stories, ancestors, other beings, rivers and watersheds.
This week, we crossed the 7th of the nine planetary boundaries, and Italy was rocked by massive civil disobedience in solidarity with Palestine. Crossing another planetary boundary is the result of collective amnesia of our love, respect and care for life. Standing up for Palestine is our collective remembering of love. We don’t need growth and innovation; we need healing, reconnectedness, solidarity, and oneness. And what heals, connects and weaves better than Love?
You can’t argue love
Love isn’t an idea; it is not debatable, you can’t discuss it, it is no framework, no method; it is the air we share, it’s the pulse of humanity, it is at the base of how we show up to life. While we can debate policies, strategies, or ideologies endlessly, degrowth versus green growth, monoculture vs. regenerative agriculture, left vs right, there’s one truth that resists argument: showing up with love creates room for kinder, healthier, more resilient futures to emerge. And yet, in many of our decisions, love doesn’t enter the room at all.
Love is contagious, but in a society where individualism and competition prevail, trauma is everywhere, healing is scattered, and the walls of protective coping mechanisms are sky high, allowing love to flow through us isn’t easy. We turned love into something transactional. Like an emotional vulnerability that requires a response, a clear indication that our love is reciprocated.. Instead, I want to invite you to see love as a source of life, a stream that must keep flowing, an energy that you can bring into the world, without expectations, simply because bringing love into the world always brings forth an extra, very welcome, dash of thrivability.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth, indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden
Allowing love to re-arrange our Being
If love is contagious, what does that mean for the challenges we face? How would our responses to ecological collapse, social fragmentation, or corporate decision-making change if we understood love not as an individual feeling trapped within the boundaries of our heart but as a viral energy? How can we embody love in our workplaces, in our movements, in our small choices, even in something as ordinary as what we put in our shopping baskets? What if love enables us not just to share the mic but to let the mic go? What if love enables us to heal our trust in our collective being? What if love dismantles us from all the constructs, arguments and stories that have been disconnecting us? What if we choose to practice our loving muscle through small every everyday actions? What if choosing love is the antidote to fear? What if, over generations to come, consistently showing up with love will help us heal our traumas? This is not the work of one generation; it’s a journey we share with our ancestors and predecessors. We are all someone’s ancestor, and we can be the one who chose love, even if that makes us seem unintelligible in the current time. Choosing love over disconnection, hatred and apathy is never seen as the unintelligible thing when viewed from a deep time perspective.
Remembering love as innate
In the early days of autumn, I was walking in the forest across my childhood home. This forest has been my reenergizing friend for as long as I can remember. Here I played hide and seek as a child, foraged chestnuts, befriended the pigs with their curly tails and listened to the songs of the birds changing with the seasons. This particular morning, I was stopped in my tracks by a gorgeous, fairytale-like red and white dotted mushroom. The ones that make it hard not to believe a little gnome chills under it when the enormous humans aren’t around. In this moment, I was reminded of my deep love for this forest, for the mushrooms, the seasons, all the beings, my relationship with them and yes, even for the imaginary gnomes. There seems to be a division in people’s relationships with forests, those who love them, truly and deeply.. And those who see them as carbon sequestration statistics and nature-based technologies. I don’t even have to ask what kind of relationship will prove to be more powerful in the protection and care of a forest. Seeing forests, rivers, oceans, soil and mountains as objects will lead to fatigue; it is a relationship so far removed from our innate way of being that it will consume you, whether you realise it or not. Now imagine the forests, rivers and mountains as your kin, your neighbours and friends, your loved ones. How does this feel? Expansive? Generous? Contagious?
And this is why the question “What if love is contagious?” matters. It’s a portal into a different and, at the same time, innate way of being, one where our decisions, our organisations, even our crises are met from a place of deep affection rather than fear.
I have to admit that it pains me that I feel I need to hold this question, create space for her. It pains me to live in a world where love is kept boxed and guarded. As I can’t imagine anything more powerful, strong and resilient than showing up, stubbornly, consistently, even in the face of collapse, from a place of love, and yet we shun it from the workplace, education, the more-than-human world, decision-making, from places of power and politics. What if creating the conditions for love to flow through us, collectively, is the work we need to be doing right now? What if love truly is work made visible?
Seismic Questions Gathering
Dordrecht, The Netherlands - 21 Oct - 19.30 CET
For those of you who are living in the delta region of the rivers of the North Sea, you are more than welcome to join us for an in-person Seismic Question Gathering. We are meeting in Dordrecht on the 21st of October in the evening to hold space for the question: What if we embody the wisdom that love is contagious? How may this alter the way we show up to the multifaceted challenges we are facing? Please reach out to me for more information if you are interested in joining.
Fully support this. So beautiful and so to the point your text. I deeply believe love is the answer. This was a reminder to me to cultivate more love in all I do and with those I cross paths with. Thank you Minou.