Love Makes a Family
What is love? (Besides a banger 90s hit.)
It comes in so many different forms, shapes, and colours that you can put in what you like, take from it what you will, interpret and feel it depending on time of the day or where you are in your journey through life.
Some people spend a lot of time thinking about it, some people spend very little time at all. Whatever it is, it’s what you make of it.
When I think of love I don’t think of grand gestures, but rather my parents and what love looks like to them.
I think of them sitting at a table with coffee, toast and a newspaper each, quietly beginning their days and not saying a word to each other until they have to. Even then, it’s usually just a statement from one of them that they’re going to go pull weeds from the garden, or if they’re feeling spicy, a wry remark about politics motivated by whatever article they just finished reading.
Their love has been around a long time – so long that it looks very different to what it looked like when they met, and what it looked like while I was growing up and still living with them.
Whatever they think of it, I’ll never know, but it makes me happy to see people content with their lives. They built their love up, starting from nothing, and enduring decades of time.
Kind of like…art. It’s an idea given form.
In all the forms it comes in, there’s something for everyone.
Love doesn’t have to be neat or tidy, but it can be. Love doesn’t have to have clearly defined borders, goals and outcomes, but sometimes it does. Love doesn’t have to be what anyone else thinks it should be, but that doesn’t mean that to every single person on the planet, it’s exactly what they, individually, think it is.
When you see love that isn’t the love you give others or want to receive, it’s still love.
Love is a powerful emotion, even when it’s almost passive. Everybody reading this has their own ideas about love and to whom they give theirs, and their feelings and ideas are as strong as everyone else’s - Near impossible to budge, change or influence.
But it’s ok to not see love through everyone else’s eyes. There’s a lot of love in the world and if we could experience it the same way as our neighbours do, we’d all be pretty confused. But we don’t deny their love because it is as real as our own.
Fernie Pride Society, like all Pride organizations, works to create the safety and freedom to love. To provide the spaces where people can quietly, or loudly, express their love; for a partner, a spouse, a chosen family, for themself. Frequently, this involves intentional gatherings with the opportunity to connect because at the heart of love is connection and community. Love makes a family.
From February 9-12, we are excited to welcome people from the Columbia Basin and beyond to Fernie for Queer Out Here; a 2SLGBTQ+ Conference. A quilt of ideas will be sewn and the framework for all to express their love will be pieced together. People will gather, make connections, create community, and demonstrate that love is found daily in all places and at all times. Sometimes you have to create the space and time for it, but it is always worth it.
I think that’s art…and I think that’s love.