shut the fuck up when you hear love talking.
shut up and open
this title comes from Kendrick Lamar’s song Purple Hearts (ft. Summer Walker & Ghostface Killah). it’s really been stuck in my head, won’t leave. it tugs at my sleeve, pushing me quieter. listening, i’m stilled enough to hear but not without motion.
the song offers a smooth and thrumming imperative. i nod along, it adds a barely perceptible bounce to my step. love as in groove.
i wonder if i know it’s love talking by my initial speechlessness, jaw dropping slightly. i wonder if love makes itself known first by shock, then relief. hey, i know you.
love speaks from outside of us—through song, through gesture, through presence, and also from within us.
at a book talk i listened to this week, answering a question about silence, adrienne maree brown spoke about her process of speaking her own truth (the love from within?):
“it takes that quiet, there’s a waiting…slow down, no even slower than that, get quiet, no quieter than that, no you have to put your phone down, and you have to not check it with anybody else, not yet, quieter, okay there it is.. and I can feel inside when i’ve gotten quiet enough and i’m like i can’t argue with it, this is the truth, Palestine does need to be free and abolition does need to be realized in our lifetime, there are things that are just true……..it’s here you can’t take it from me”
paradoxically, the shutting up is a kind of opening—a getting to the pace and register at which sincere communication can happen, flow. this love that talks, it’s urgent, but not rushed. it’s on time, it’s often to the beat.
she continued, “sometimes you can feel a thing that you can’t analyze and you can’t place when it happened in your memory but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel it and it doesn’t mean it’s not true and it’s just in the quiet of your body…….all of you have a different set of these truths in you all of you are swimming up some streams in your lives all of you have found places to take these risks”
shut up and hear it, shut up and let it through.
open hearted, learning from loss, flawed, blessed twice:
(^ also from Purple Hearts)