The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.
Interpretation
True love begins with self-acceptance and self-love.
In this quote, Bell Hooks emphasizes the importance of self-love in any journey toward finding love from others. Recognizing that our relationship with ourselves is fundamental, the quote suggests that embracing our true self, particularly as women, lays the groundwork for authentic connections and healthy relationships with others.
In practice
During a women's retreat, this quote can be shared to encourage participants to embrace their true selves.
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 PhDβs, 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 β 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.
There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.
Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.
Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
If I said I was madly in love with you, I'd be lying and what's more, you'd know it.
I think true love is not only true personal love but totality of love, universal love - to be in love with everything manifest and everything unmanifest.
Kiss me out of desire, but not consolation.
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