Let's talk about love...and our fear of it!

In my work with a beautiful program, the Native Health Initiative (www.unc.edu/~flega) over the last 3 years, I have constantly seen love in action...the Indigenous communities of Turtle Island are in touch with the power of love, and will share it willingly to those who approach respectfully.

However, it is interesting to see how uncomfortable people are with our mission to address inequities in health through loving service...they cannot see how injustices in health could possibly be linked to a foundation of love.

A recent article about NHI, thorough in its coverage of the partnerships and projects of our work, left a big, gaping hole...there was no mention of the LOVE foundation to our work. It is only the reason for doing the work, the funding source, the guiding tool, etc....nothing important right?

I wonder,

Was it thought that readers of this article would not have understood loving service?

Would they have had a problem putting together the reality that Indigenous citizens and communities live sicker and die younger, a result of the lack of love in our society, with a program that is funded by, driven by, and carried out through love?

Maybe it would have threatened the crdibility of the program, and therefore the article itself, to talk about love?

It is one of the symptoms of our highly technological, mechanistic world that we cringe and assume the fetal position when talking about love in such an open sense. The hug we would have received in the past is now a smiley face at the end of an email, text message, or IM post.

Maybe a bigger issue, though, is the way that our world has fallen into a fear-driven mentality, requiring love to take a back seat.

Look at the Bush aristocracy (uh...I mean, U.S. foreign policy) and how we deal with nations as enemies (e.g. they won't give us unlimited power over their oil so that we can ride around in our SUVs), inspiring fear that terrorists are out to get America unless we get them first. We use military might to try to force peace, ignoring the love-based strategy of promoting educational and economic systems that will promote a sustaining peace...and in doing so, we only escalate the hunger of all parties involved to devour and destroy the other.

But it is not only a problem of fear at this level. Look at our lives and communities. Is it love or fear that has allowed us to build a society that says (by its actions) that the expression of melanin in the epidermis is the best lie on which to base our society, our lives, and our communities? We live in a society in which de facto housing segregation has produced communities that rival apartheid South Africa's! We fear going into each other's communities, places of worship, schools, groceries, etc.

We must tug at our hearts to release us from the bondage and lies of fear, along with the heart-numbing existence that is our addiction to technology...

We must open our hearts to see a world in which "us and them" replaces "us vs. them".

We must begin to talk and walk in love, building our lives, our communities, and our fragile planet on this foundation.

I know that we are capable of it, and I know that we can each do something today to begin the heart revolution...

In love,
Because of love,
And through love,
I sign off for now!