Rest In Peace/Love/Joy/Power!!

2021 has been relentless. The deep and continuous lost of spiritual, cultural, and intellectual mentors, thinkers, and leaders feel personal. I never met bell hooks but her concern for community, and individual and personal growth and development, mirror mine. I was introduced to hooks’s work in the mid-late 90s, but it was All About Love: New Visions (2000), published the year before my mother’s death, that wedded our journey. At the time, I was wrestling with love – What we think about it, how we deploy it,  and the ways in which we move with and through it – and why it is so powerful, yet not powerful enough in helping humans to live good and better lives.  Then came Salvation: Black People and Love (2001), Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation) (2002), and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004); I aspire to write – about my earthly meanderings, love, and justice and varying other forms of human connection – with the elegant precision of hooks. 

Thank you bell hooks for your fierce and loving presence in this world. Godspeed.