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garden/Kapwa Love.md
Gil d3cf68ce21 Sync 2025-01-11
2025-01-11 19:33:12 -06:00

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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 hooks1

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. ↩︎