you are stronger than hate

You are stronger than hate is my motto lately.  I was making art recently, and slogans I like were coming to me:

• queer liberation for all life forms
• queer revolution
• fight the power
• love one another

You are stronger than hate was loud and clear.

The sentences are ideas I need to share and need to hear for myself.  Sometimes I get so discouraged.  An idea can help me keep going.  Like a friend to pull me forward when I think I can’t continue.

compassion

For a while, my motto was The world doesn’t have to be this brutal.  I experience out in the world that compassion, kindness, tenderness are options used too rarely.  There’s a default to harshness that I see in many people.  Sometimes doing love-work, I feel up against too much.  I feel an inner, “Fuck it–I give up.”

Like doing peace work.  Yes, I can prayer vigil and protest for my own integrity and to try.  Also it can be encouraging socially, to resist with friends.  We can form community and make something new.  But being up against a billions, billions of dollars military industrial complex Goliath, I feel way too minuscule a Devi.  I can get sad and like “what’s the point?”

Hate is easy for many people to slip into.  Love is a lot of work: staying enlivened to the needs of myself and others, smiling, having an open heart and mind, opening my arms for a hug, letting people in, giving, patience, compassion.

So many people turn off their curiosity and care.  It’s easier to think they know it already.  Or they’re so hurt by the world that they can’t risk another trauma or letdown.

Yes, it’s incredible work to keep showing up.  I know trauma and letdown.  But my light wants to shine.  I rest–withdrawn and hidden–so I can emerge another day, ready to try again.

Staying curious, open, paying attention is a big part of what I’m on earth to do.  I need to reach out and be who I am.  Not to shut down and hurt anyone.

you are stronger than hate

You are stronger than hate also.  I see people choose violence, rigid resistance to change, rigid resistance to differences of gender or ability, closedoffness, bitterness–my heart aches for them.  I want to encourage them, that they can make another choice.

When I see myself in anger, that’s fine–anger has a lot of purpose.  But I don’t want to live there.  Anger can simmer and simmer into hate.

Thank you, anger, for your message and energy.  I feel the anger like I feel anything, to help it pass through me, in motion so it doesn’t get stuck.

I remind myself that I’m stronger than hate.  And I believe that, as I build my love-strength.