Thank you Tripp Hudgins, Gary Kenny, and many others for tuning into my live video with Beatrice Marovich! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Love as Material Practice
A Field Guide for Our Collective Becoming
We are living in a time when “love” is invoked everywhere and practiced almost nowhere.
It is printed on tote bags.
Quoted in speeches.
Whispered in spiritual clichés.
And yet cages multiply.
Borders harden.
Neighbors starve.
Communities fracture.
If love still has civic power, it will not be because we feel it.
It will be because we practice it.
Love is not primarily a feeling.
Love is infrastructure.
What follows is a field guide — not to admire love, but to locate it in matter.
I. Love Has a Body
Somatic Regulation
Love is somatic before it is symbolic.
It regulates.
It stays.
It absorbs impact without retaliating.
It softens without collapsing.
Love that lives only in language dissolves at the first sign of discomfort.
Ask yourself:
Where does love land in my body when it costs me something?
Whose bodies do I instinctively protect?
Whose bodies do I ignore?
Can my nervous system remain present when repair is required?
If love does not alter our physiology, it remains abstraction.
II. Love Has an Economy
Resource Allocation
Every budget is a theology.
Every ledger reveals devotion.
Love allocates time.
Love redistributes wealth.
Love recognizes unpaid labor.
If you want to know what a people loves, follow the money.
Ask yourself:
What do I materially fund that I claim to love?
What labor is invisibly sustaining my life?
If love were prioritized, what line items would change?
Who bears the cost of my comfort?
Love without redistribution is sentimentality.
III. Love Occupies Space
Spatial Rearrangement
Love rearranges geography.
It opens guest rooms.
It protects basements.
It feeds strangers at long tables.
It alters zoning laws and sanctuary policies.
Love makes room — and that always displaces something else.
Ask yourself:
Who is welcomed into my physical space?
Who feels safe in the spaces I curate?
What would it mean to build infrastructure for belonging?
What spaces exist because someone risked loving publicly?
If love does not alter space, it remains private.
IV. Love Persists Through Rupture
Repair & Return
Love is not proven in harmony.
It is revealed in repair.
Repair is humiliating.
Repair is slow.
Repair requires proximity.
We were trained to cancel, disappear, dominate, or spiritually bypass — not to stay.
Ask yourself:
Do I know how to apologize without self-protection?
Can I remain when discomfort arises?
What communal rituals sustain repair?
How long am I willing to practice love when it is not reciprocated?
Love that cannot repair will eventually dominate or disappear.
V. Love Confronts Power
Structural Courage
Love is not neutral.
Empire calls control “protection.”
Nation-states sanctify surveillance.
Families weaponize silence in the name of unity.
Material love interrogates power.
It asks who benefits.
It asks who is harmed.
It asks who disappears.
Ask yourself:
Who benefits from my silence?
When has “love” been used to justify harm?
What does abolitionist love look like in policy, policing, borders, prisons?
What structures would need to fall for love to be real?
Love that does not challenge domination becomes complicit.
VI. Love Moves in the Undercommons
Fugitive Circulation
Sometimes love cannot be public.
Sometimes it survives in kitchens, train compartments, encrypted threads, whisper networks, chosen family tables.
When surveillance intensifies, love goes underground.
It circulates laterally.
It feeds without permission.
It protects without spectacle.
This is the love that sustains the hunted.
The love that passes resources hand-to-hand.
The love that keeps breathing when institutions fail.
Ask yourself:
Where does love hide when it is criminalized?
Who keeps us alive when systems collapse?
What practices of quiet solidarity sustain us?
How do we protect love from becoming performance?
Fugitive love does not seek recognition.
It seeks survival and collective becoming.
The Measure
Love is material when:
It costs something.
It redistributes something.
It shelters someone.
It repairs something.
It resists something.
It circulates even when forbidden.
Everything else is aesthetic.
A Baldwin-Edge Benediction
We must decide whether love is merely a word we use to console ourselves while we participate in systems that devour the vulnerable — or whether love is the force that will require us to surrender our innocence, our comfort, and our lies.
Love is not here to make us feel better.
Love is here to make us braver.
And if we refuse to practice it in matter — in budgets, in bodies, in borders, in repair — then we should at least have the decency to stop invoking its name.
Because love, if it is real, will indict us before it redeems us.
—
If this stirred something in you, I’d love to hear:
Where have you seen love practiced materially?
And where are we still mistaking aesthetics for devotion?
Paz,
RCE+
