When I turned seventeen, my best friend S sent a two-part mix CD—complete with six pages of handwritten annotation—from her side of the world to mine by post. The opening track on the list, right under the title (TUNES FOR TATE), was Teardrop by Massive Attack. ‘I love the intensity of this song,’ S wrote, ‘and the opening line of “love is a verb, love is a doing word”, and how true that is.’
She’s brought that lyric up a lot in the eight years since, and so, as truth and affection go, I think about it frequently; it sits in my mind as a kind of modus operandi, and in the drawer of my bedside table, on that folded, pink-lined artefact of time and care and distance. That article of self-proof.
I have been thinking about it particularly of late, in the time since my last newsletter, watching the violence unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank. Watching a new government display blatant disrespect for tangata whenua, te reo Māori, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In any time, but especially times like these (and we have to believe there are times that aren’t like these—better ones—even if we have to build them), love is essential in its verb form. As a call, and compulsion, to act.
I have been thinking about rage, too, of course, and defiance—all kinds of motivators; each of them, in their own way, fuelled by love. I keep finding myself back with that central tenet. What it asks from us, and what it demands: the conscious effort to show up, again and again; to share, to sign on, to speak out. To step away from comforts served up by entities also profiting off bloodshed.
It’s vital that we continue to bear witness, that we take action in the ways available to us, that we hold our systems to account. That, at the same time, we hold on to hope. Who does it serve for us to lose out on that? Who do we help by drifting into resignation or fatigue? Where do they sit in relation to those for whom we are duty-bound to act?
Love is a well ever-filling, a driving force of which you cannot be unjustly dispossessed. One of the few. And it is a verb. It ripples; it echoes; it replenishes itself tenfold, and more, in ways we couldn’t know to measure. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you any of this. But perhaps it bears being said by one more person, one more time: we owe it to those we claim to love to honour the sentiment with action.
I hope you are, and have been, keeping well.
Mā te wā, e hoa. Noho ora mai.
💫 T