I went up to the woods, or what’s left of them—little more than a copse of trees—and I brought a magnifying lens with me. A Bausch and Lomb fifteen times magnification. I looked at the mosquitos that dined on my left forearm while I sat under a tree that still remembers what life was like before colonization. There were two different species of mosquito. One with a furry round brown thorax. One with a black abdomen with silver stripes. The antennae that appeared to sprout from their ears were fractaled like TV antennae from the 1950s. Some sunk their proboscis so deep into my skin that their ommatidia were nearly touching me. Others supped with one back lag thrust up into the air, like a dog at a fire hydrant. I guessed that this leg served as an early warning system pertaining to any threats in the environment. But I don’t know. One expelled a few drops of water from its abdomen while it drank. Tiny silver balls, so small that they clung to individual hairs on my arm. Another appeared to have trouble getting what it wanted. It moved its proboscis in and out of me. In and out, in and out, now deep, now shallow, now at a slightly different angle. This tiny wound did not swell up any faster or larger or itchier than any of the others, although I thought it might. My people have been doing such a good job of indiscriminately killing everything since we came to these lands that I figured the least I can do is permit the mosquitos to suck my blood unhindered.

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Hey mama,

I looked back through the pictures I still have from when we all lived together and it’s hard to miss that you’re almost never smiling.

And, hey mama, I read a book about the ways in which angry and controlling men abuse their partners and manipulate everyone around them and I got real sad thinking about you and me and him and all of us.

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Jacques Lacan famously asserted that “to love is to give what one hasn’t got.” When I first encountered this line, I associated it with the Lacanian notion of desire and how it is related to the eternally elusive object a and the ways in which we project desire onto others (even though our own subjectivity has been constituted by the desire of the Other [i.e., L’Autre, A], which is why “desire is always desire of the Other [A]” and why the Subject [S] is constantly barred by the signifier  imposed by A, leading it to be recorded as S). We attempt to objectify others–to seek a within them–but we are forever frustrated in this effort. Thus, when the subject is objectified by A, S responds lovingly to A by seeking to fulfill A’s desire, but S does not know what A actually, really, truly desires, nor is S capable of adequately being a, and so S attempts (but fails) to give A what S does not have to give. But this is not what Lacan actually asserts. I read his statement in the following way: “to love is to [attempt (but fail) to] give what one hasn’t got” but what if this is not the case? What if love actually succeeds in giving what one hasn’t got?

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My son fell asleep hugging the doggie and, before I went to bed, I saw pictures of Brown boys in cages and one of a Brown father who drowned with his Brown child in a brown river by a brown land and, while I looked at those pictures, I read about Men In Blue who rejoiced when they saw the same things.

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About a year after I moved back to the forks of the Antlered River, I decided to reconnect with my father. It had been quite some time since I last spoke with him (it’s a long story), but I emailed him and he agreed to meet me at the local Village Pub.  I was unsure as to how I might react to seeing him. Having sometimes deeply regretted that I never fought back, I thought about punching him. I also thought about hugging him. Sitting on the pub’s patio, having a beer while I waited for him to arrive, I figured things would sort themselves out one way or another.

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Love is doing the dishes. And cleaning the apartment when the mess is stressing you out. Love is trying to stay on top of these things so that it doesn’t get to the point where it stresses you out—it’s just tricky sometimes when you live with a little girl who moves through space like a tornado intent on transforming, reorganizing, creatively redeploying, and otherwise repurposing everything she touches.

Love is sleeping on the couch while the trucks rumble by like 18 tonne tumbleweeds composed of scrap metal on the road outside our front window because my snoring, too, is like an 18 tonne tumbleweed—only this time composed of grizzlies and orcas forever locked together in mortal combat—and you need to get a good night’s sleep so you’re not too tired at work tomorrow. Love is being happy to be on the couch knowing that you’re just two rooms away. And when I sleep, you’re only as far as the next dream.

Love is having a quiet moment to myself and wanting nothing more than to write you a poem to say that I love you.

Love is putting on The Bachelorette so that you can watch the show and I can watch you and pretend that I’m watching the show when you look over at me. Love is being astounded that you, you, Jessica, are even here at all on the couch beside me. How did I get so lucky? How is this even possible?

Love is waiting to use the bathroom until you’re done in the bath.

Love is teaching myself to pay attention to things that I never paid attention to before because they are things that matter to you. In this regard, amongst other things, love is making sure I actually clean up *all* the hair I leave around the sink after shaving, instead of just cleaning up enough of the hair to make the sink look, mostly clean or clean enough (apparent “clean enough” for me is not the same standard as “clean enough” for most other people).

Love is not putting on my music while we putter around so that you can play your playlist.

Love is learning all the little things that annoy you and drive you crazy and then only doing them sometimes.

And, as you fall asleep, love is lightly scratching the back that you turn to face me and singing the songs I make up about you and our love and this tender, wondrous, ridiculous, and oh so precious life we share together. Love is not caring that my voice cracks and that I don’t always (or often?) hit the notes I aim for. Love is not caring that my lyrics don’t flow or rhyme, and not caring that I hardly know what I’m going to say until I say it. I have never known a love that moved me to spontaneously burst into song, but now that I know it, how could I not sing? Love is singing anyway.

Love is all day, every day, it’s sacred and mundane. It’s an adventure and a homecoming, a teaching and a game. It’s a glacier and a mountain, and the intimacy of how one rises and falls while the other flows. It’s a boat and an ocean, and we’ve barely left port. Once you find it, it’s everywhere.

Love is what we are and what we do. Love is us.

I rest my head upon your stomach
In the space below your navel
Between the upswell of your hips

I breathe

We are sweat and skin and the sheets that I’ve kicked off the bed
And when I fall asleep
I dream the tree whose branches scratched against our window
Is whispering to the others

“I’ve found it! I’ve found it! The kind of love that remakes worlds. The love our grandparents told us is only born once every three hundred years.”

And the trees looked in our darkened window—
While I dreamed upon your stomach
And you hugged me with your legs
And brushed your knuckle on your lips
And mouthed a silent O—
And they rejoiced

The fundamental evil of our time is that we have allowed some people to grow so rich that they have forgotten how to love, they have forgotten why we love, and, in fact, they have forgotten what love is.

What those who have grown so rich that they have forgotten how to love know is greed and what they feel is fear. Where greed goes, fear will always follow. But fear is the opposite of love. A society that is afraid is a society that does not know love.

What are the rich afraid of? Many things, but ultimately it comes down to this: they are afraid that they will one day be treated the way in which they have treated others.

Therefore, because the rich are greedy and afraid, and because they are always vastly outnumbered by those whom they are actively and continually dispossessing, they propagate ideologies, academic disciplines, political economies, religions, ethics, and social imaginaries, designed to teach all of us—no matter how poor we are—to forget the how, why, and what of love and to, instead, know greed and feel afraid.

In this effort, the rich are ever only partially successful. This is so for a few reasons including the following: many among the dispossessed know that life without love is literally unliveable; many among the colonized remember other ways of structuring life together; many among the oppressed see through the lies of the oppressors; and babies, themselves, come into the world loving unconditionally.

This final point suggests that love (and not some kind of neo-Darwinian notion of “selfish genes” or “survival of the fittest”) is what exists at the core of being. To be is to love. Only a sustained assault upon our being, thinking, hearing, seeing, and imagining, from the time we are born until the time we die, can make us forget this.

Given this ontology of love, to forget love is to embrace nihilism. We see this nihilism playing out all the time in the mass destruction of life we are witnessing today, in the merciless laws crafted by the rich, and in all the ways cruelty and ruthlessness are justified and valorized. If we allow some people to grow so wealthy that they forget the how, why, and what of love, the end result is the annihilation of life as we know it.

If to be is to love, then life is impossible in a world without love.

Therefore, if we are to confront the fundamental evil of our time and contribute to the formation of a world where it is easier to be good, the rich must be dispossessed of both their wealth and the fear that accompanies it. In this dispossession lies their liberation. It is an act of love that presents the rich with the possibility of, once again, remembering what love is, why we love, and how to love. It is an act that makes life possible—for them and for all of us.