Many revolutionary workers right now are struggling with anxiety and apathy, impatiently feeling stuck and burdened. We are emotionally burned out from the chronic distress of living in late capitalism. Even as we fight against collective injustice, we feel alone in our search for a sense of security that we have never really known.

What binds all life together is love; an honest, actionable, reciprocal, unconditional love that asks us not to prove our individual worth but begs us to surrender to our inherent & collective worth without exception. It is the love that takes such insult at the violence of injustices against it as to call forth our righteous anger towards non violent action. It is the love that drives revolutionary workers back to their liberation through collective power.

We ask for it in many forms:

Still, so many of us struggle to receive love, to feel it it wash over us. We may even have already fought or fled from it if we were even able to feel it at all. We have an unending supply available to us at all times and yet too often our access to it has been ripped from us through chronic, systemic & cultural violence that alienates us from our collective pain & power. Too often have we been handed dehumanization, abuse & betrayal wrapped up in a package someone maliciously called “LOVE” for us to trust receiving the undeniable power of the real thing could possibly come without the cost of pain.

As usual, our innermost human instincts are right. To be loved requires the great pain of tending to our wounds so they may truly heal. It requires the death of the insecurities, fears, and judgements that keep us from loving ourselves. It asks of us to see how the disconnection we feel has been done to us intentionally & that we are the ones who must fix it together.

When we commit to this, we find that love is the endless sea from which we come and to which we can always return. It can offer us security & abundance unmatched by any other resource. It can be shared and multiplied without end.

We can receive it in pieces and parcels like sharing hot meals, being appreciated for something that makes us feel insecure, or that thing about a hug when someone really means to hold you in their heart. We can allow it to wash over us in collective mourning rituals, celebrations of joy amidst tragedy, and in non violent action taken by the thousands in response to our collective oppressions. We can counter the voices of violence in our minds with ones of love and acceptance instead.

When we are unable to receive the blessing of love from the many sources from which it can be sprung, we lose what frees us from feeling burdened, anxious, apathetic and impatient about the violence of our shared realities. When we run from the power of love beyond division, we atomize ourselves until we feel human no more, metastasizing the violence of capitalist imperialism.

We can allow ourselves to receive radical love that has been offered to us in the past & that we seek in the future through affirmations. We can extend our vulnerability and expressions of radical love for others, allowing it to cultivate moments of reciprocity from unexpected connections.

When revolutionary workers are in relationship with kin and community that restores our access to this abundance, it becomes a part of our social chemistry. It interrupts our grief and rage and sadness, weaponizing them for us instead of against us. It wafts from us like musk, sparkles in our sweat, deepens our dimples that we may not hide it even for our best efforts. Our capacity to be in such relationship with radical love require us to bathe in it as fully and often as we are able.

How have you radically received love lately?