It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything and it’s not for lack of reading. Nor is it for lack of reading fascinating and entertaining books. Believe me, this is NOT the book I expected to land in my blog. But it became my read for the first week in the exceptionally long month of February. And here it is March and I can’t quite shake some of the ideas. Let me remind you that these posts are an exploration of how reading impacts my life. These are not book reviews or critiques or recommendations. These posts are a thought or two about a particular book that shifts the way I think and live.

Sometime in January I got an email from Sounds True https://www.soundstrue.com/ to join The People’s Inauguration: The Revolutionary Love Project. I asked myself, “Who couldn’t use a little revolutionary love right now?” This program asked for 90 minutes per day for ten days starting the day after the Presidential Inauguration. I could do that. And I did, until the grinding sludge that ultimately became Life in February started working its way into me and, suffice to say, I didn’t complete the ten-day program. But one of my nieces did. When we discussed her experience, I wished I’d stuck with it. So I decided to read Valerie Kaur’s See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love which is where the ideas for The Revolutionary Love Project were spelled out.

It might be worth noting that I tend toward the idealistic. I want to believe that “love conquers all.” So not surprisingly, what lingers with me these weeks later after reading See No Stranger is this sense of idealism that pesters me with “What if?”

What if … I took Kaur’s idea for dealing with those who seem “other” to me in some way and said to myself, in Kaur’s words, “that person is a part of me I do not yet know?” What if I took a minute to get to know them a little, listen to their story, figure out why they think the way they do? I didn’t like the idea that a part of me could be anything like so many of those who dominated the headlines, stories and politics. But what if there was a connection? Then I remembered this inspiring post from Reasons to Be Cheerful. https://wearenotdivided.reasonstobecheerful.world/the-unlikely-friendship-that-helped-legalize-same-sex-marriage-in-ireland/

What if … I lived as I believe and as Kaur states so well: “… that each person has inherent and equal worth. In every culture, in every part of the world, there are those who have expanded the idea of ‘us’ beyond family, tribe, and nation to all humanity, insisting that even as we are primed to see the world in terms of ‘us and them,’ we are also able to tap the depths of that wellspring of love within us and choose to love beyond our own kin?”

Valerie Kaur writes that it all starts with wonder, as in “I wonder about that other person.” She addresses fear, rage, grief, difference and offers ideas for how to deal with them. (The Revolutionary Love Project website has all this information too.) I didn’t love reading about all her personal trauma. But that’s the thing about this book, written by a Sikh woman (I learned a lot about Sikhism too) whose family has lived in the central valley of California for over one hundred years: she has gotten me to ask myself, “what if we tried to live as revolutionaries for love?”

Time to lay aside my rose-colored glasses, put on my reading glasses and get after the tasks of my life. Just know that along with Kaur’s ideas, there is this wise song playing in the back of my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7xMfIp-irg