The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

There are times when so much talk or writing, so many ideas seem to stand in the way, to block the awareness that for the oppressed, the exploited, the dominated, domination is not just a subject for radical discourse, for books. It is about pain – the pain of hunger, the pain of over-work, the pain of degradation and dehumanization, the pain of loneliness, the pain of loss, the pain of isolation, the pain of exile... Even before the words, we remember the pain.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.

In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love.

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.