These two photos are not unrelated. Solidarity work is directly linked and reflected in our most intimate relationships. This world can be a devastatingly awful place, even though it is a privilege to live in it (if only because God has created us, and so to challenge this latter fact is to be at odds with His creation). Human greed is a cancer which has landed us at today – greed for land, greed for money, greed for natural resources, greed for material things rather than greed for things which actually live and serve our hearts such as love, kindness, and compassion.

Look at most all romantic relationships around you. Are they in service of kindness and compassion or are they rooted in discord and selfishness?

I have always believed that love is the only revolutionary act that exists. To live in it fully, every day of my life on this earth is not an impossible measure. Rather, it is a measure when chosen shifts our world on its axis. It is a measure I choose daily, and refuse to settle for less; Allah continues to light my way to a heart strong enough to carry everything I bring, and to not just accept it, but to revel in it and to seek more of it, alhamduliLaah.

Love; it is the only thing worth being greedy for. My body is explosive in it’s greed for it and everything that this truth demands.

My home is full of love and care. Softness, understanding, mercy, unconditional. Love is a liberation. Love is liberation. It is the creation of space for tenderness, vulnerability, and fear. Most critical of all, it is the creation of space for hope; the nurturing of and belief in it. It is where this world opens her heart, where I reach for the hands of others, and accept those extended to me.

My door is always open. My table is always ready to feed. My home is where people come to be nurtured, and where their fears are heard, and softened; it is where I hold people, and tend to them and shut out all other greed. It is a gift to be granted entry into my space, one which I do not extend easily, one which I guard ferociously.

Recently, it is a privilege which I have pulled hard and fast from those who are not of my Tribe, those whose greed sits anywhere but in love. My entire body has become a machete in service of my safety – platonic, romantic, and all which rests in between. I am no longer even tolerating those who see any of my intentions in love as being rooted in anything other than that. Not at 49. Not after years and f.cking years of friendship when I have done nothing but nurture and care.

To those whose privileges have been pulled, I wish for them only a love so strong that it might change their hearts. But not on my time. And not in my home. And never again in my future.

My home is compassion, touch, tenderness, but for the select few now. One cannot have compassion for those they demonize. One cannot touch those who they dehumanize. One cannot express tenderness for those whom they see as inferior to themselves. Certainly, one cannot love or care for those whose intentions are seen as devious when they center themselves in anything not of my own truth.

All of this is revolution. It is coming out from beneath the thumbs of capitalism, colonialism, and oppression built around and to the protection of a select few, to the exclusion of others. It is the refusal of any and all systems of greed but the only one from which far too many of us continue to turn: love.

In homes not of my making, greed sits shoulder-to-shoulder with hopelessness and fear. Scarcity principles that He will not provide. That He will not lift. That He will not safeguard. Homes not of my making, they sit sour, and cold, built on the lie that we cannot change this world.

But we can. And we will. Because every single time we stand next to others in solidarity and in service of love, justice and mercy, we root ourselves unequivocally within the belief and demand for a better tomorrow.

Always, steadfast. Always, with alhamduliLaah on our lips.

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