Love’s Scribe

My mission in writing this book is to identify and promote a common language and structure that engages us in a collective conversation about love at a deeper level – to address the global love deficit in a demonstrable way that is both strategic and tactical. All humans need to be loved, to be safe, healthy, and happy, to be healed, to find peace and calm, to connect and contribute, to give and receive loving-kindness, and enjoy lives that unfold with ease. These are core elements of love that are addressed, in one form or another, in many spiritual paths. The earth is our refuge in the vastness of space and time. It is an extremely rare and beautiful gift, yet we are destroying it and ourselves at an alarming rate. Ultimately, it isn’t a question of knowledge or resources that obstructs our evolution – I believe it is the love deficit within ourselves. I want to help reduce this deficit, serving as an amanuensis to love.

Creatively Maladjusted by Love

The German language has a particular word: Herzensbildung (heart formation). I haven’t found a better word or cultural concept that speaks to the life experience I have had that has brought me here. Many moments in my life led to me being “creatively maladjusted.” I thank my mother, Cella Coffin, for a generous portion of these moments. From a very young age, she steered me, my sister Elizabeth, and my brother Lawrence toward matters of social conscience. As a family, we marched against war and racism, nuclear weapons, bigotry, and homophobia, and we marched for the environment. As a family, we marched for love.

On April 4, 1968, I was only nine years old, and my social conscience was just beginning to evolve and shape my character and sense of life purpose. I was watching our old black and white TV, equipped with a coat hanger and a tin foil antenna, when the news of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination was broadcast. Intellectually, I wasn’t truly prepared for this news, nor did I know how to process it, but I ran to my mother in the next room to tell her because so many times she had spoken to us about him, and we knew how much my mother was affected by his teachings. When she came into the room with the television and realized what had happened, she burst into tears. The emotion was so intense that we all began crying too. Her pain etched something extremely powerful into us at that moment, a maladjustment, an emotional wound that never healed. Even now, thinking of that moment, I will cry because the pain my mother felt and expressed was so profound and so deep. From that moment forward, I was never the same. A powerful seed was planted in me – a sense that love was greater than our family unit, that there was a powerful societal-level love, an unconditional, transformational, and transcendent love that was immense and limitless. I discovered this love was accessible through sacrifice, service, compassion, social justice, and caring about our planet.

I can’t say that I have ever learned how to love God through any religious means. Outside of religious institutions and dogmatic constraints, I have found personal connections to a higher power with key figures and elements of various faiths… from Jesus to Bhudda, Nelson Mandela to Marianne Williamson, and even Kurt Vonnegut (his book Slaughterhouse Five was mind and soul altering).  I have found a sense of deep faith and spirituality in the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others like him who have been willing to take love to its highest limits and to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the greater good. My “career” of social change and service and my choice to be an artist are examples of the maladjustments in my life inspired by pain and sacrifice. I could not possibly have stayed on these paths my whole life if it were not for my beautifully maladjusted mother, her incredible pain and sacrifices, and all the amazing maladjusted family, friends, mentors, and colleagues who have kept me bent for life.

During my 40-year career, I’ve seen all kinds of human suffering. Most of the mess we’re in right now as a planet has to do with problems that humans have created. Humans have a long history of war and slavery and genocide, and other forms of systemic hate and violence. As a species, we’ve done some horrific things to our fellow humans as well as many other species. We have all kinds of artificial boundaries, denials, cognitive disconnects, and toxic mental constructs that are self-destructive and dangerous. The science that there is no such thing as race is conclusive: there are only Homo sapiens – there’s only one human race. We may have different hair and skin colors, nose sizes, heights, and languages, but we’re all the same species. Nonetheless, we still create all kinds of mental illusions and myths that we are separate and different from others. Then we use those artificial separations to differentiate ourselves from other human beings based upon meaningless criteria and imaginary boundaries that imperiled all life on earth.

I am deeply grateful for the life work of Dr. King and all his sacrifice. He shared the insight that “creative maladjustment” is essential if humanity is going to evolve to the next level. I would need to write another book to share the many moments of magic, places of refuge, and enlightened souls that have planted the seeds in me that now flower in this book. For now, I will to cut to the chase and share the distillations of love that have resulted from the creatively maladjusted life that I have lived.

Qualified Love Agent?

All this may sound good, but what are my “qualifications” to provide guidance on the subject of unconditional love? I committed my life to service over four decades ago and worked for nonprofits and social change my entire life. I have worked for and advocated for the hungry and malnourished, seniors, people with disabilities, refugees, homeless, mentally ill, inner-city and abused children, indigenous women, and more. Along the way, I acquired two college degrees in leadership and organization development. My experience working in social change and service led me to believe that there is no shortage of experts or expertise to solve the most complex human problems. Instead, what seems to be missing is a lack of leadership and organization. Decades into my work, I continue doing my part to try and alleviate hunger, health disparities, trauma, mental illness, homelessness, child abuse, metabolic disease, etc. I began to see a common thread, or missing threads, in my life work. Yes, you may have guessed it – unconditional love.

I attended two faith-based universities, and not once during my education was the “love” word used, studied, or applied to the field of leadership and organization development. Nonprofits, which fundamentally thrive upon the fuel and quite often the vapors of love, rarely feel comfortable using the word love or incorporating it directly into their mission, programs, or operations, choosing instead to imitate the transactional framework that most for-profit businesses assume. I have learned that there is no significant human problem that we do not already have the solution for, that we do not already have the resources to solve. I learned that leadership and organization are essential but that unless a highly developed and structural form of love underlies it, these frameworks will also fail. I think Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came the closest to understanding and insisting upon a higher form of love that is “structural” – he brought this to his church and the movement he inspired. It wasn’t just a lone assassin that killed Dr. King – it was and still is a system of fear and hate that breeds assassins. The only way to stop the assassins is to stop the systems that generate them, and the only way to stop these systems is with structural love.

If there were a doctoral program in structural or transformational love, I would be the first to sign up. And this would be the core of my thesis: Hate and love are systems that are grown. The current polarization occurring in the U.S. and other countries is manufactured by wannabe puppet masters who deliberately divide humanity by propagating fear, hate, and violence. Human beings aren’t born hating each other. We are born into this world as sensitive, kind, tender, loving creatures. But while the systems of hate have evolved into sophisticated machines, the systems of love have lacked the rigor of development and structure needed to keep up and to keep fear in its place.

A paradox of love is that it can have the ‘side effect’ of making us lazy. While fear puts us on hyperalert, love naturally lets us drop our defenses and relax into a field of positive energy. But here is the thing – love must be “woke” and evolving, strong and strategic, present and omnipresent, vigilant and organized ­– more so than any army or stultifying bureaucracy. Like other organisms, the love system can be grown, developed, evolved – or devolved. The difference is that the systems of hate are parasitic – they are, by nature and design, systems that always exploit and consume more than they create.

The systems of unconditional love, composed of powerful structures, aren’t simply sustainable or regenerative; they are generative by nature and design. These systems of love transcend conventional physics and thermodynamics and put more energy out than they take in. If love is a universal element – like all elements, then let’s consider tapping its power in a scientific way. Love is elemental, and love offers us amazing structures to tap into its limitless power.

This may sound contrary to your understanding of physics or like a naïve conflation of metaphysics with physics. Perhaps so, but perhaps this separation is only perceived because our physics is still so primitive. Where in our physics books can we find love? Nowhere. Our species has imagined a universe that is ruled by entropy (gradual decline into disorder), a universe that modern science tells us “culminates in heat death.” That’s a dark narrative for sure. With such a master narrative, it is no wonder our species is so violent and self-destructive. It takes a bit of hubris to believe that at this point in the evolution of our species that we fully understand the nature of the time-space continuum and the fundamental processes that shape our universe, at least so much that we can scientifically rule out love as having any vital role in the “big picture” of things.

I’m hoping a deeper and more advanced understanding of love from an advanced scientific perspective may ultimately free our minds enough to entertain new theories about how the universe works. Until then, our fear, baked into our biological organism, will continue to permeate our thinking. The only way we will free our minds is by letting go of fear and freeing our hearts. But, love, like flying – takes skills, design, and adaptation. I believe love will take us farther through the universe than any of our flying machines because, ultimately, love travels by means that already cross this universe and the next. Love is communication that can be transmitted over great distances – much further than biological or non-biological beings.

PART II: FRAMING LOVE

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

“I think… if it is true that

there are as many minds as there

are heads, then there are as many

kinds of love as there are hearts.”

― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Structural Love

‘Tis through Love that atom pairs with atom, In a harmony eternal, sure; And ’tis Love that links the spheres together—Through her only, systems can endure.
-Friedrich Schiller

While romantic love is a rewarding and worthy subject to explore, my interest in love is not this territory that has already been amply covered. Instead, my interest is in fostering conversations about what I call “structural love.” “Structural hate” is rampant in our world today… embodied in systems fueled by fear and ignorance and manifest in bigotry, sexism, racism, hunger, homelessness, and perpetual war. These systems are well funded and organized. You can get a Ph.D. in War Studies, become an engineer and design weapons of mass destruction, or join a global corporation that specializes in extracting earth’s precious resources, exploiting humanity – or even destroying it. Structural hate offers many career opportunities, with lucrative benefits and positions that provide incredible power and rewards. These systems have a sophisticated definition, infrastructure, and manifest in highly developed industries and economies.

Structural love is another story. We can find many independent actors who have laid the foundation for structural love, and even some examples wherein they specifically call for a more organized and structured approach. However, it is not unusual to encounter these exceptional individuals railing against the prevailing organizations of their time – because these systems failed to deliver love. And, sadly, it is also not unusual for these characters to become the victims of terrible persecution and violence. When it comes to unconditional love, it often seems like “no good deed goes unpunished.”

Many organizations are dedicated to spreading love in one form or another – we typically refer to them as NGOs (nonprofits) or “faith-based” institutions. However, love is rarely called out as a “program” or found in the bylaws. It is difficult to find a course of study that results in any “degree” of love – higher education in love, or even “refresher courses.” Ironically, in some cases, faith-based institutions limit their love to “true-believers,” making love an exclusive club, only available to qualified members who accept certain teachings or commandments. And, due to limited resources, many NGOs are required to limit how much love they can spread, focusing their efforts on narrow segments of the population – like the homeless, the hungry, or abused.

The brightest possible future will only come from love, and our ability, our motivation, to take love to the highest level possible. This requires some level of structure, rigor, dedication, and a community dedicated to the highest level of collaboration in this effort.

Romantic Love