The Higher Values of Love
To fellow solarpunk writers: I deeply hope that our stories are built on a foundation of the higher values of love — kindness, respect, cooperation, the brotherhood of humankind. The hope of a better world seems tied to new attitudes about ourselves as
To fellow solarpunk writers: I deeply hope that our stories are built on a foundation of the higher values of love — kindness, respect, cooperation, the brotherhood of humankind. The hope of a better world seems tied to new attitudes about ourselves as individuals, as members of a society, and as siblings of a single human family.
Kindness, the social child of love, seems a simple place to begin. Let's fill our solarpunk stories with kindness, with characters who care and love. Let's create good role models for our children, as there is such a lack of them in the real-life world we live in.
Lin, age 10, the protagonist of my solarpunk series Lin of Luratia, loves love. She's got her share of imperfections, but love is what drives her — love for her mother just passed, love for her people, love for progress. Here's an excerpt from the first book in the trilogy:
“I’ve known your mother all her life,” Elder Evig’s wife told me, “and she was very much like you when she was a child.”
“Like me how?”
“Older and wiser for her years. Keenly perceptive of goodness and the higher values of love.”
“The higher values of love,” I repeated. “I don’t know what that means, but I like the sound of it. It sounds like poetry.”
Elder Evig’s wife smiled and squeezed my hand. “The values of love, Lin, are the ways of love — kindness, fairness, honesty, patience — and yes, they are like poetry. A life of love is like a work of art that you give to others and leave to the world.”
“I want to live a life of love.”
“I believe you will, Lin. But you must remember that wanting and doing are not the same. It’s easy to want to live a life of love, but it’s not easy to do.”
“Why?”
“Living by love’s ways is a matter of choice and effort, unlike breathing or growing taller, which happen without any thought or effort on your part. When we do as love would do, it’s not an automatic happening. It requires effort to make it real.”
“Like a poem, it doesn’t write itself.”
“Yes, Lin, yes,” she said. Though Elder Evig’s wife was old, her eyes and smile could have belonged to a woman mother’s age. “There are two ways of living, Lin. Automatic living or creative living. Animals live automatically. They don’t make choices in the way that we do.”
“I want to be wise.”
She smiled and leaned close to me. “You are wise for your age,” she said, “and you will grow in wisdom, I’m sure of it.”
“Does being wise mean I’ll live a poetic life?”
“If your purpose is love, yes.”
“I guess you can’t go wrong with love.”
“Love is the best guide for how to live our daily life. We make many choices in a day. Some large, some small. And in every choice we make, we can stop and ask ourselves, ‘what would love do?’”
“What would love do? … I like that, Madam Evig. You know a lot about love.”
“I’ve lived a long time. And now,” she said, “tell me about the nightmares you’ve been having.”