Mirrors of Love

Love does. Love, you have to work at it.

Still and forever on Love, here we are again! (hakhakhak: laughs in shameless obsession). Hear me out…

Love is action. Lots and lots of actions actually. And we have to learn, practice, work at it. It is rarely, if ever, an innate thing contrary to what we may be told, have been told, what is popularly represented or popular sentiments. It would be too bold a claim to say everything can be learned— I don’t know enough to make that claim; I barely know anything, LMAO! However, I am a testament that love is learnable—whatever form they take, whether it's acts of care, thoughts, words, etc. can be learned and I have been learning.

I wasn’t always the most loving person. It feels fraudulent to speak about these things as if they are totally and utterly in the past because they aren’t. However, forgive me for the sake of the piece.. I was saying that I didn’t always know and/or fully understand what it meant to do as love and show up as love, but that I have been learning– slowly, in bits and pieces. In learning, I’ve come to understand that we learn in one of two ways, or better yet both of these two ways. In no set/particular order, one of the ways we learn love is by practicing what we ideally want. The other way we learn is by mirroring what we witness. I have learned both ways. First by trying to show up for the people in my life how I think they need me to and how I think I’d like them to show up for me, then secondly by mirroring the people in my life who goes out of the way to show up for and intentionally love and be loving to me.

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“Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will–namely, both an intention and an action.” - Bell Hooks

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Contrary to popular sentiments that love and care are innate attributes (especially for women and girls) we’re rarely conceived or birthed knowing how to love and care for ourselves or others. Babies literally grow up and the first thing they say or do is simply a replication of something they’ve seen their guardians (or at least one of them) do. It’s fair to say that almost everything is learned so the assumption that love and the ability to love and care are and should be innate, that it is something we’re born with or should already know from birth is to me a problematic and unproductive point of view. Especially if love was never modeled for you, it can be difficult to just get up and be it. To just grow up and know what love entails, how it show up, what it looks like. Also, love is modeled very differently from household to household, community to community, relation to relation, etc. So to grow up in such an un-simple and very complicated world and expect everybody to just know and be familiar with a single model of what is also a very un-simple and complicated emotion and act seems to me a farce.

Our first model for love and care are our parents and family. If love and care aren’t modeled for us, we then have to do the labor ourselves. Every time I have shown up for people I love in whatsoever little or big way wasn’t because I was born that way, but because I wanted to show up that way, because I very intentionally made the necessary emotional and physical investments to do so, and never as a result of some innate design. To see others and show up for them so that they know you see them is the act of love and it’s a labor I believe we all have to decide to undertake on our own. If we lazily claim that other people were born/are innately designed more loving and as a result are just able to show up more loving than us we’re setting up both ourselves and the people we claim to love unfairly.

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This year I had the most interesting August  and September I can remember. I like to say I lived a thousand and ten lifetimes– wheewww, thank God for life right? Lol. My experiences over the said two months led me to think more in-depthly about the subject(s) of this piece. I’ll spare you the long stories and just share that on more than one occasion I was shown up for in what to me is the most loving, most sincere, and most revealing ways ever in my life. When I first drafted this piece it only mentioned August and a single event. Howbeit, since August the list continued to grow overwhelmingly and it just felt unfair not to mention September and factor in the other events as well. 

The "little things" are never little. They are always always the grandest things. I now wonder when and why they were coded "little things" when they are the very things we cannot wrap our heads or arms around, when they are the things that stretch our hearts and fill us up, when they are the things that make us feel like people are climbing (moving) mountains for us, when they are the things that make us feel adored in a sky-big way, when they are the grandest things in the world. To have been shown up for how I was, I am awe-struck still, my heart swells and I will forever be filled with gratitude (1) because these acts of love and deep care have reaffirmed me, my heart, my existence. Because of them I know more than ever before that I am seen, heard, cared for and loved so honestly and wholly, and (2) because I get to learn by mirroring the love of people who loves so beautifully and breathtakingly. My mirrors of love are blessings. 

I hope for mirrors of love for all of us because I understand how in learning to do in love and show up as love it is critical that we are surrounded by people who are loving and/or who are ready and willing to put in the required efforts and intentions to be loving as well. These people are our mirrors and we get to learn from and with them.

Also and most important, I hope all of us can have mirrors of love and care that we want to replicate in the most beautiful ways. Mirrors we can always stare into and love love everything that looks back at us. Mirrors that make us want very tirelessly and sincerely to pursue our call to be the most loving and caring people the world has seen.

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Thanks friend, for giving my words a home in your heart. My Mailing List is live. Join and invite a friend to do same.

All my love always,

Tea🤎

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