Love looks like devotion.
It looks like the horticultural workers of botanical gardens and arboretums who curate their plants with imagination, near total attention, and season after season investment in the well being of their ecosystem.
Love worthy of our finite, valuable time, assumes the shape of devotion.
We live in a love-cynical time. Not without reason. The experiences of love are as varied as the persons whose experiences are considered.
Cynicism and suspicion usually have histories and a whole lot of life underneath them. This is true, I think, concerning any facet of human experience, including one as unwieldy, as inescapably important as love.
Love, argue Nietchze and his legatees, is a fool’s errand in a world where might so often defines right.
If we entertain this premise, it implies that the love, at best, is a private, conditional concern. Or that love is a public ethic worth holding in economic times of expansion but not recessions, not in inflationary periods, not when underemployment and unemployment are constraining our communities’ well-being.
I think the Nietchzhean will to power position on love, while not without its insights, is mistaken.
Love and its devotional labors constitute a form of power unto itself.
Politically, the love as devotion that inspires political work is an underestimated source of power, influence, and collective agency.
Here, I think of the love that inspired a Haitian revolution, that undergirds the best of the Movement for Black Lives, that motivates constant battle and negotiation to ensure that someone we hold dear is made better because of our labor.
On a personal level, love as devotion — in a lens of power — means asserting the inner authority to choose the terms upon which you relate to yourself.
By this, I mean devotion as in celebrating yourself, encouraging yourself, every now and then treating yourself.
Such love as devotion might also include confronting yourself, holding oneself answerable to a higher standard, allowing oneself space to chance. Nipsey Hussle, the late poet of Compton who taught us so much, implied that such work involves dedication, hard work plus patience.
Love, however defined, involves devotion.
If we claim to love something, our commitment to that thing must rise above mere interest, mere intrigue.
Even the word commitment fails to capture the thoroughgoing dedication of self that love asks.
Love, whenever we have felt it, assures us that we are worthy of continual care, worth individuals and institutions going “all in”, regarding our well-being.
Love, that will to bring all the good we can, into all the spaces we enter, with all the intelligence, emotion, and personal touch we can muster, is a worthy labor. Is a practice of power.
Love deserves devotion, your devotion, our devotion.
Thin love, argued Toni Morrison, ain’t love at all.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argued that we must be extremists for love in practice, for love’s meaning in altruistic action.
Love takes wholehearted effort, not that halfhearted, slapped together, thrown together effort.
Love deserves devotion.