Ember's Writing

Word count: around 1,450 words 8–10 minutes (if reading contemplatively)

A personal awakening through bell hooks's All About Love reveals how depression, distraction and consumer culture all respond to the same unmet need, and invites us back to love.

Today is Sunday, and by happenstance it has become a spiritual day for me. I have received something of an awakening, and I share this as an invitation.

For some weeks, an intensity has been with me. It showed up as a reduced capacity to do the things that usually nourish me: leaving the house, making progress on projects, learning, reading the texts that matter. My inner dialogue grew less compassionate, and it became easier to read difficult meanings into situations.

This is not to say I stopped showing up. I kept my appointments, even received stunning feedback from people I work with. But my glass recycling bin filled in four weeks when it usually takes six months. I played games and watched telly. I didn't ride my bike or leave the house much.

But today, oh glorious day, I managed to get out. Last night I stuck my nose outside, persuaded by the storm's threat to fling my recycling boxes around the neighbour's. I certainly didn't want my boxes joining that festooned party! It was super windy and wet, and usually I might venture out to enjoy the aliveness of extreme weather. But last night I couldn't be bothered. I felt curious about why not, what had changed in me. Perhaps the taste of rain on my skin and wind in my hair had already begun to wake something up.

I sense that my depression, and others' too, seems to be in tune with the climate's changing. More intense: both the aliveness and the lows. The storms and sunny days are longer, more frequent, more intense. In some interdependent, spiritual sense, this makes total sense. Gone are the long, slow climatic shifts of spring and autumn. Instead: more storms, one day warm the next a gale. Fewer grey days, less gradual change, fewer days of steady rain, more swings.

And alongside it, in myself and my peers, I notice more intense joy, and more awakening. I am considering it a 'quickening': an urgency, an invitation for us all to awake from our slumber of comfort and distraction, to enjoy the intensity of being alive, and to get on with the work of midwifery of what must come.

I am relieved and delighted that today I am experiencing more of that awakening sense. I so yearn for a return to a more gentle temperament. I am tired. I hope someone else will do the tasks of change.

The confluence of events that led to my awakening today mirrors the extreme wind yet sunny day. Yesterday: stormy, dark, flooding. Today: rainbows in the mist from the surf on the sea. Choppy, choppy sea.

The confluence was this: finally having the capacity not only to leave the house, but to sort and organise my possessions, to do housework that would lead to the warm, organised environment I want to inhabit, and also to start reading bell hooks's All About Love.

She has been speaking to me in a way that resonates, that entwines so much of the thinking in my life. When I was 17, I took the new desktop publishing and laser printer software I got through my education and printed out the word 'love'. I did it in many fonts and many languages. I was a student of ancient Greek, so I wrote love in that language too. One 'love' per A4 sheet. I decorated the walls of my room with these sheets of love, each carefully and evenly spaced so as to create a circle around me. I was trying, I now can see, to create something of a magick circle, surrounding myself with and inviting in love, even though I had little idea of what it actually might be.

Despite the deeply religious schooling I was subjected to, which spoke of love, I very rarely experienced it in a way that was meaningful. Not in my family home, or my relationships, or my education, or my communities. An indicator might be seen in how my closest peers at school rarely used the word 'love', instead preferring to use 'the L-word', like it was some kind of taboo or unknown or unknowable thing that should never be spoken of. But something knew deep in me that something was missing. I did receive love from my step granny, and I'm endlessly grateful for her loving presence. Her love was not one of hugs and warmth, but of education, choice, care and respect. Around me, I could see adults more focused on their work, their political standing, or their sexual needs, whose words to me were universally harsh and critical. Very rarely were they nurturing, offering the kind of nurture a child needs to grow in compassion rather than confusion.

I ended up as a road protester, an activist, which led into open source software advocacy and consultancy, and a life where my financial means were not well met. I felt confusion.

Occasionally I'd find tribe that shared something of what I was seeking, but our trauma was always more present than our capacity to heal, And our arguments more prevalent than a capacity to meta-cognate, to think about what's going on, to recognise the sociology, to have language for patterns in our culture that led us here.

Now that I look with more clarity, I realise I was playing lots of computer games and watching lots of videos to distract myself from the numbness and pain I was feeling. Many needs were less met than was supportive; companionship, warmth, accompaniment, hope and love.

bell hooks names this: when we've had enough pain, we turn to addiction, substances, shopping, screens, to find the pleasure and satisfaction we never found in love. She calls it what it is: a response to lovelessness. Reading this, I had the experience of being seen. My games, my telly, my use of sex, alcohol and cannabis were my attempts to manage needs that weren't being met.

I recently visited a local shop with my teenage child and invited a challenge: were they able to identify one thing in the whole of the shop's stock that was not part of people's strategies to manage their distress? They couldn't find one.

So I'm deeply grateful to bell hooks. I've had the book for maybe a year with an intention to read it, but sitting down to read has been harder than my discombobulated ADHD mind could support. I felt guilty for that. But yesterday I got the audiobook and set up my non Big Tech systems so I could listen as I did housework and walked on the beach.

Oh my goodness. My sense is that whilst she doesn't know NVC as a formal syntax and grammar, other than that, she gets so much of it. She gets it so passionately and deeply. It's a gift to read someone else that sees things in a similar way, and can write about it so eruditely. She weaves together and names so much stuff that I have sensed and haven't had language for, what gifts! Thanks to her, I'm now more able to walk towards examining love and my relationship to it. To let go of my traumas, and to get my needs better met.

I so yearn for an ethics of love in myself and in others and in our culture. I so yearn for compassion. And for realness.

With love and hope, I invite and encourage you to take on the challenge and read bell hooks.