garden/Kapwa Love.md

# A Kapwa Kind of Love

## The liberatory capacity of *Kapwa* for elevating love

We cannot trade love for *Kapwa* as *Kapwa* alone cannot displace the great power of love. We must instead understand how *Kapwa* can enhance and deepen our love. Conceiving oneself as a shared existence which includes others, increases our capacity for loving others, loving ourselves, and loving our community. Learning how to love can allow us to grow in *Kapwa* as well – recognizing that loving oneself enables loving others and vice versa. Much like *Kapwa*, love is neither automatic nor incidental; we choose to love, willingly embracing and intentionally building it in parallel. When we cultivate *Kapwa*, we open ourselves to love, and our nourished sense of *Kapwa* encourages us to ground our love in justice.

> Truly cultivating *Kapwa* – to recognize a shared identity, of a self in unity with others, and embrace the emergent power thereof – can enable within us a transcendence into radical love. To explore my personal concept of *Kapwa*, I've written this meditation on *Kapwa*, containing my personal reflections and thoughts. I hope that you'll find these ideas enlightening and that they'll broaden your perspective. Thank you so much for reading and supporting my work.

## A Foundation for Love

> The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
-- bell hooks[^1]

M. Scott Peck defined love as "the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth."[^2]

bell hooks outlined six critical values which, when expressed together with honest, open communication, enable us to love:[^3]
+ Care
+ Commitment
+ Knowledge
+ Responsibility
+ Respect
+ Trust
  

## Freire's Radical Love

We cannot truly love unless we let love in and let go of indifference or hatred.

Paulo Freire's vision of radical love is one that is "never about absolute consensus, or unconditional acceptance, or unnecessary words of sweetness ... instead, it is unconstructed, rooted in a committed willingness to struggle persistently with purpose in our life ... to be lively, forceful, and inspiring, while challenging and insistent... and intimately connected to what it means to 'be human'"[^4]

critical community building, dialogic space, and critical reflective practice

In Teachers as Cultural Workers (2005), Freire gave us seven indispensable qualities that teachers who embody radical love should possess:
+ a commitment to humility
+ Dialectical ability
+ Courage
+ Tolerance
+ Decisiveness
+ the ability to recognize the tension between patience and impatience
+ joy of living

[^1]: hooks, bell. 2006. _Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations_. New York, NY: Routledge.
[^2]: Scott Peck, M. 2003. _The Road Less Traveled, Timeless Edition: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth._ New York, NY: Touchstone.
  
[^3]: hooks, bell. 2018. _All About Love: New Visions_. New York, NY: William Morrow.
[^4]: Darder, Antonia. 2002. _Reinventing Paulo Freire: a pedagogy of love_. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.