What Englobes Us

a look at love and collective liberation.

Prue Stent

Below, find some podcast suggestions and readings about Love that inspired this research. I also suggest you make a herbal tea before reading this piece, and savour it tenderly. Enjoy!

“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.”

Richard Powers

You are here because of a collective effort of cells, ovaries, sperms, endometrium, uterus lining, fallopian tubes, sweat, your carrier’s organs, their strength, their love, skin, sex, the soil, the sun, the songs. We exist as part of a cosmos, we are mutually reliant.

In the last few years, I have explored Love in many ways, from pleasure to deconstructing love, to revisiting love from a non-anthropocentric view. My exploration of Love began from a feminist perspective, primarily looking at how patriarchy had affected the way I looked at love and how that manifested collectively, and has now expanded to other realms.

I keep coming back to the topic for two reasons: the first is that I think it is a writer’s duty to keep digging and to understand their work as constantly moving and evolving. The second is because I think Love is intrinsically connected to aliveness.

Patriarchy and capitalism perpetuate a narrative that keeps us separated, to counteract this narrative is a poetic antidote. Today I want to talk of Love as a collective endeavour. In my research, I have found that a lot of the narrative around Love speaks of it as an individual, or binary, concept. I, on the contrary, believe it is something that can only achieved collectively. This is why I keep speaking of relationality and how important it is to understand what connects us rather than what separates us.

To showcase love as mutual reliance, I want to tell you a story about a place rarely explored, the Deep Sea.