Love: A Feast Beyond Valentine’s Day

By Rivera Sun

Love is in the air . . . or at least occupying the airwaves this week, selling chocolates and roses and candlelit dinners for two. But this romantic love is just a thin slice of the feast of love that exists in the human heart. And when Valentine’s Day rolls around, I always rebel against such limited fare and demand the full deliciousness of all kinds of love.

Love of one’s family. Love between friends. Biophilia (love of nature). Agape (the selfless love that a person feels for strangers and humanity). Love for what Dr. King called the Beloved Community. And most especially, love-in-action, one of the many phrases for nonviolence.

The concept of love-in-action runs like a river through the ecosystem of my writings, nourishing the characters in my novels, giving them strength, courage, and nourishment as they stand up for change. In the slightly-fictionalized world of The Dandelion Trilogy, love shows up over and over again. Beyond the obvious love story of Charlie Rider and Zadie Byrd Gray, there’s a potent strand of a deeper, more provocative sort of love.

It is our love that calls us into action now. Our respect for life and our compassion for creation require us to stand up to the forces that cause oppression, suffering, and destruction. – The Dandelion Insurrection

Love is a powerful force in their world, galvanizing people into action. It’s not ‘nice’ or ‘well-behaved’. It doesn’t conform to convenient expectations or limit itself to one person or another. As Zadie discovers in a moment of soul-searching:

This was not the love of pink valentines or pecks on cheeks. This was a blazingly fierce and painful force that raked its talons through the soul and sliced all nonsense into shreds. This Love was here before the universe. It will remain when all is gone. It was coming to walk the Earth again . . . inside every human form.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of love doesn’t get a lot of airtime. It isn’t used to sell chocolates or roses. This fierce love propels people to confront injustice and abuse. It compels us to take a stand and to challenge bullies of all sizes. It is transformative and liberational, not just for some, but for all. It has the potential to heal the wounds we carry from centuries of divide-and-conquer strategies. It protects our souls as we dare to rise up against the horrors of the world, keeping us from becoming that which we oppose. It rattles the very foundation of empire. It changes everything.

Those who seek to profit at the expense of others refuse to give it airtime in our culture.

Those who want to exploit and abuse people and planet try to keep it out of the spotlight.

Those who gain power through fearmongering and spreading hate would rather keep our thoughts pinned inside the relatively narrow box of romantic love.

Because if finding true love is our primary goal, who has time to overthrow tyranny? The near-exclusive focus on romantic love is part of the propaganda of individualism – a worldview that is convenient to profiteering, but disempowering to the social movements who require our collective action to succeed. Unless we remember our love for community, people, and the Earth, then millions of us are sleepwalking through history, passively accepting the world’s injustices.

But if we remember our big, broad love? Well, that would change everything.

Revolutions happen because your heart throws down the gauntlet of its love. – The Dandelion Insurrection

Imagine if we fell in love with place as passionately as with that certain someone. Imagine if we swooned over humanity as a whole. Imagine if we dared to love our country – not with blind patriotism, but with deep commitment – enough to make sure it is living up to its stated ideals. If these kinds of love were unleashed within millions of us, it’s not a question of what we’d do. The question is: what wouldn’t we do?

As Dr. Cornell West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” In Winds of Change, the third book in The Dandelion Trilogy, Charlie, Zadie, and the Dandelions grapple with the long, hard work of translating love into policy and practice. They challenge national pride to take the shape of caring for people in tangible, meaningful ways. Living wages. Housing for all. Universal healthcare. If we truly love our people and our country, we would implement – immediately and without question – these pragmatic expressions of that love.

We, the People, love our people. And if you do not . . . then what exactly do you mean when you claim to love this country? – Winds of Change

At the heart of my ferocious, unrelenting critique of my country is a vulnerable confession of love for this strange place. I love some of the core ideals that have persisted in our often-sordid and unjust history. Liberty and justice for all is a worthy notion. Democracy is worth striving for. Equality is still a revolutionary idea for humanity. I’d like to see us achieve it. I share the sentiments of Charlie Rider when he wrote:

I want to love this broken-hearted country, this land of shattered dreams and dashed hopes. I want to help us rise, together, and embody our visions of equality and respect, caring and connection, justice and transformation. I want to fall in love again so that we all might heal and live and change. –Rise & Resist

I want us all to dare to love our country, not its cruel and hateful behaviors, but its ideals. It’s easy to hate, to despise ourselves and each other. Love is far more powerful though, and more transformative and revolutionary. It calls us into action. It inspires vision. It gives us the courage to demand the impossible. It makes us bold enough to dream and committed enough to persevere through the tough journey of turning dreams into reality. 

Love is far vaster than a Hallmark holiday. It is far more radical than sappy movies and sentimental cards. In our current times of competing and compounding crises, love unleashed would upend society in a heartbeat. If we loved this beautiful and imperiled Earth, we would willingly abandon the fossil fuels and pollutants that are killing our only home. If we loved the children – all children – we would ensure a livable future for them. If we loved our people, we would make sure none of them went to bed hungry or unhoused. If we loved humanity, we would stop all wars.

Love is a cornerstone of human existence. It is core to our nature.

Without love, we are walking dust, dead matter stumbling from the dawn of birth to the dusk of death. Without love, humanity sleepwalks like automatons, shoved through a nightmarish existence.

But with love?

With love the pivot of change emerges, the lever stretches long enough to move the world, the arc of the universe bends toward justice, the spirit of humanity soars, and the flood of life revives.

I write about love to remind us of our power. I write about love to break through the cloud of hate that confuses us. I write about love because it is the saving grace of humanity as we stand at the eleventh hour of our existence. Remember your love.

In this present moment, which hands like a bead of dew on the grass stem of time, where the life of the planet lies clouded by question marks and the body of humanity sprawls in a wasteland of our own making, the love song of our ancestors and descendants is calling us to rise.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun has written numerous books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War and the board of Backbone Campaign. www.riverasun.com