Love Lessons from bell hooks & Berea

I had the esteemed opportunity to be keynote speaker for The bell hooks Center’s annual Gender Talk series last week. To say that I am grateful would be an understatement. The truth is, the faculty and students at Berea College healed something in me in ways I forgot were possible.

I went to Berea feeling a bit of professional burnout. Surviving society this year has been an exhausting task and a relentless subconscious weight. Though I try to protect myself from informational overload, even with measured check-ins, our current violent political ethos has been difficult to teach through and personally terrifying. Added to that weight has been the labor and process of grief healing I’ve been stuck in for a few years. I’ve only just recently begun to feel myself crossing to the other side of it with clarity and emotional relief. Still, the need to move beyond my own internal struggles and re-engage lfie in scholarly ways was a chore I hadn’t yet found the strength to address. In Berea, I experienced a demonstration of love that reignited the flame of my academic passion and gave me access to a scholar’s work who showed me the possibilities of marriage between passion, intellect, and activism.

Combing through the bell hooks archive was an experience unlike any I’ve ever had. hooks’s entire life is stored in those boxes, giving us access to the full range of her personal and professional experiences, and her deep commitment to the extrapolation of meaning from feeling and being. I was profoundly moved by the consistency with which she wrote every day, saved everything, wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable and raw by documenting her growth and development.

I came home and immediately started tearing through things in my office, gathering the scattered pieces of my own journey. I ran out and bought folders and boxes to begin organizing my life and work. Feeling the stirrings of curiosity again, I hopped online and bought books to satisfy a reinvigorated hunger for knowledge. I walked out of the archive writing poems and conceptualizing a new book. I started pulling together the pieces of new articles in my head!

Perhaps the best way to describe the experience is … “neuroplastic”—a reanimating occurrence of reorganization and formation of new neural pathways, feelings, and movement after a long period of paralysis. My scholarly limbs tingled, twitched, and were overwhelmed with sensation again. As the “kids” today say … I got my LIFE!

More than anything, I came away with clarity and confidence, finally certain about how to combine my creativity, sense of “calling,” spirituality, and academic knowledge in a meaningful way; I found a vision. What an amazing opportunity.

Sometimes healing is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time with the right people. We find knowledge best when we approach life being okay with not knowing and not having the answers, comfortable in our cluelessness, but still curious and open. I am learning to seek love and to accept it in whatever way it shows up, to sit with it and let it bloom inside myself, to let it teach and make me more capacious. I am finding my voice, listening to it, and allowing it to lead me where its echoes will resonate—to be in tune with time and in harmony with the soul of the world’s need for healing.

Many thanks and much LOVE to Dr. Shadee Malaklou, Innaugural Director and Founder of The bell hooks Center; Dr. dp patrick, Assistant Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies; Dr. LeAnna Luney, Assistant Professor of African American Studies; Dean Travis Albritton, Chaplain, Rev. Jonathan R. Whitfield; and the Berea College students and Faculty.