A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.
Interpretation
True love fosters a sense of belonging and openness, alleviating fears of abandonment.
Bell Hooks emphasizes that a generous heart, characterized by love and openness, provides a safe space where individuals can come and go without fear. This unconditional love is a gift that creates a deep sense of belonging, reassuring us that we are never truly alone or abandoned in the context of meaningful relationships.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a wedding ceremony, highlighting the essence of love and belonging.
Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually "know the emotional costs of keeping a secret" until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.
Mark it down: God loves you with an unearthly love. You can't win it by being winsome. You can't lose it by being a loser. But you can be blind enough to resist it
There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.
Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.
Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes Is the deed ever truly done For Heaven and the future's sakes
Love isn't any one good thing; it's a very, very strange mishmash of emotions. Your love for somebody is, oftentimes, informed by the terrible things you might believe about yourself, and comparatively, the person you see them as is everything that you're not.
Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.
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