a yearning and it’s real to me

I read All About Love by bell hooks on Masha’s recommendation and, like all the books I’ve discovered either directly or indirectly through her (and like her own incredible work), reading it has felt transformative. 

Today I took a long walk around Berkeley and came across this.

image

I can’t think of Winwood’s music without thinking about how ubiquitous it was on the airwaves of middle America when my family went on a long road trip in 1986. I would have been nine years old. I’d get lost in the music and the lyrics as the country rolled by. (My father was perplexed at how I was even able to understand what Winwood was saying, but the words seemed perfectly clear to me.)

I think I still have a tendency, more than most people, to get lost in words and music, and I’m not above finding meaning in the most mainstream of pop songs. Aaron Kinney responded to the above tweet with a link to “Higher Love” on Youtube, and I listened to the song again and again as I walked home, and the words kept reminding me of things that hooks writes in All About Love.

Think about it
There must be higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is wasted time
Look inside your heart I’ll look inside mine

“When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love." 
–bell hooks, All About Love

Worlds are turning and we’re just hanging on
facing our fear and standing out there alone

"As long as we are afraid to risk we cannot know love. Hence the truism: ‘Love is letting go of fear.’”
–bell hooks, All About Love

A yearning and it’s real to me.
There must be someone who’s feeling for me.

“On my kitchen wall hang four snapshots of graffiti art I first saw on construction walls as I walked to my teaching job at Yale University years ago. The declaration, 'The search for love continues even in the face of great odds,’ was painted in bright colors…Every day, when I drink water or take a dish from the cupboard, I stand before this reminder that we yearn for love–that we seek it–even when we lack hope that it really can be found." 
–bell hooks, All About Love

"As our cultural awareness of the ways we are seduced away from love, away from the knowledge that love heals gains recognition, our anguish intensifies. But so too does our yearning. The space of our lack is also the space of our possibility. As we yearn, we make ourselves ready to receive the love that is coming to us, as gift, as promise, as earthly paradise.”
–bell hooks, All About Love