How We Can Work From Love
The other afternoon, I drove slowly home in thick snow, listening to an interview with a reporter who covers conflict.
How are you doing right now? the host asked.
Leaning hard into spiritual resilience, the reporter said. Making sure I’m doing the things that I love, that fill me up, so I can rise to the occasion.
And what hit me as I inched along in the snowstorm is that a practice of doing the things we love can help us work from love. Work borne of love tends to be more courageous, powerful, creative than work borne of fear. And this is a moment that asks for our courage, power, creativity.
Of the singing that defined the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle...They give the people new courage and a sense of unity. I think they keep alive a faith, a radiant hope, in the future, particularly in our most trying hours.”
I don’t know what the clinical definition of spiritual resilience is, but a radiant hope in the most trying hours seems pretty good to me.
I pulled into the driveway that snowy afternoon and took my shaggy mutt from Houston out for a walk. Turns out, this Texas gal loves the snow. She explodes out the door and gallops down the street on her little legs, every so often, whipping her head around to look at me as if to say, “CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW GREAT THIS IS?!”
And my spirit is made whole again.
We know fear can be contagious. So, too, can joy.
In a lecture on loving the world in dark times, Professor Roger Berkowitz spoke about how "joy is not escapism. It is an act of refusal: a refusal to let despair be the final word.”
Working from love, I think, asks that we regularly replenish our well of joy, of care, of “CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW GREAT THIS IS?!” energy.
My mother would put her chicken and roasted veggies in a Pyrex and drive to the water to eat dinner as the sun slid down over the harbor.
At the beach one January morning, I saw a hearty group of older women whooping and hollering their way into the icy water, then barreling back out to their bathrobes and LL Bean boots. The whole frigid cove boomed with their aliveness.
A friend comes home from a job that takes too much and gives too little. She puts on an apron, pulls olive oil and salt from the cupboard and loses track of time and her worries as she makes quiche or stew or whatever the evening calls for.
I took out a few old Far Side and Calvin + Hobbes comic books from the bookcase and flip through them while tea water is boiling. They remain as joy-producing as when I read them in the paper years ago.
There is a Cherokee story, perhaps you’ve heard it, of a boy and his grandfather talking. I have two wolves dueling inside me, the grandfather tells the boy. One is evil, anger, jealousy, self-pity. The other is joy, generosity, peace, love.
Which wolf wins? the grandson asks.
The one I feed, the grandfather replies.
So we feed our love. Which means we can better work from love.
And the more of us who do it, the more likely it becomes that love - not despair or fear - will have the final word.