My advice to you is this: Commit some bright, brave sins while you have time.

“And me? It was always you I loved, not your elegant strategy. I will love you still, if you now outgrow it. I will love you more whether time moves forward or backwards. Whether ice melts or water freezes back. Whether your next move is protection, break-through, shift, or any combination. There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three.”

I’ve been able, ever since childhood, as my parents knew only too well, to keep up an obstinate silence, one that no torture could overcome, in the face of anyone who does not seem worth replying to. Silence is my most sublime, my most peaceable, but my most undeniable declaration of war or contempt.

We must define care, love, and intimacy for ourselves outside of capitalist logic and abandon the grammar of patriarchy. I believe love requires care, but care does not require love. You can care for someone or be caring, but that does not mean you are loving. Like bell hooks, I view care and care ethics as something we do and show praxis. I am not invested in making people love each other. My care ethic says I do not need to love you, and I don’t exactly need to know you. Still, I understand our fundamental interdependence, and I am clear about what the stakes against capitalism and patriarchy are.

“Anger is an assertion of rights of worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth.” 

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.

I owe the trees my health — the beauty of the blossoms, the beauty of things growing. Above all, the softness of the air breaks down my intensity.