more collective love. more sisterhood. more of my Blackness. 

When I look at this image by Elizabeth Catlett, I reflect on the fact that I have been a member of a social club — a women’s organization — for the vast majority of my life. I am forever grateful for my sorors of Gamma Pi Beta Sorority Incorporated. The organization was founded in 1940 and revived during the Pandemic. 

Yes, Women’s History Month has passed, but I am a woman every day that I wake up, and there is nothing like sisterhood and being around women who look like you. It is something I will never take for granted. In the times that we are living in, we need each other for this reason.

 bell Hooks speaks about love in her essay, “Love As The Practice of Freedom”: “The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns.”

And this is why less is always more. I take note of and have reflected on this essay, walking away feeling like we need to love each other better — not for what we have materially, but within — that spirit-being that we all possess: Love.

 Being vulnerable in this way is empowering. I am thankful for genuine friendship and for having the opportunity to meet up on Sundays, even if just for one hour, and to be vulnerable — simply to be myself.