We pulled up through the quiet green streets of Berea, Kentucky, a progressive oasis in this Southern State, past a perma culture village, past the college, (tuition charged on an ability to pay basis), to the small brownstone home of bell hooks. She was in her front yard, putting dirt into potted plants. She waved as we pulled up and called out, "welcome!"

We sat down at her kitchen table, in large airy living room decorated with sacred art. She had a warm, glowing presence, a being infused with love.

I told her how much her book had meant to me, in my personal journey to understanding love, and how important love was to everything - to spirituality, to politics, to life on earth and beyond. Her definition of true love is the commitment to enhance your own or anothers spiritual growth. For her, love is at the core of everything. It is the meaning of life. Love and domination cannot coexist. An abusive relationship and a loving relationship cannot coexist, though sometimes people trick themselves into believing that is possible. She explained that since she had left New York City and returned to her roots in Kentucky, she'd been doing a lot of gardening, working in the land. And she was coming to see love like the way one tends a plant - watering just the right amount, not too much, not too little, giving what is needed. But not forcing the buds to open. Allowing for the autonomy of the plants own process. Autonomy does not mean seperation or the rampant individualism of post-modern narcissitic society. It means the freedom to truly be yourself, and that can happen in relation to others, fully. Freedom and commitment can co-exist.

Bell began her work on love after teaching children, and discovering that for many of them, the concept of love was foreign, a joke even. To encounter cynicism amongst these tender souls was heartbreaking to bell, and she became determined to work to address this grave issue, the issue of the lovelessness of western society.

Love is about joining in community, about connection, and this is very threatening to dominator culture, which has an investment in maintaining our disconnection. The creation of love allows justice to prevail. Love says there is nothing that can't be healed.

Love allows us to move beyond fear. We need to respect our fear, bow to the dragon that is fear, and recognize that we will never be completely free from fear. But we can proceed with life, despite our fear, realize that the fear is not us.

Fierce Light for her, is awareness, fierce compassion, fierce love, opening to that which is, fully. The sacred is to be found in every moment, not in an isolated context, not in some distant enlightenment. It is in the flash of a red cardinal across the sky, in the new blooms of a lily in her garden.