Reclaiming Love as Our Source for Work
I sat in the vast auditorium of the Armory Building in Tacoma. Originally built in 1908 as a storage and training facility for the Washington National Guard, it quickly began serving multiple purposes for community concerts, dances, and sporting events. In 2011, it was abandoned as a military facility and given over to the arts and events under the management of Tacoma Arts Live.
On this night, the stage was illuminated with teal green and dusky grey, sparkling with golden starlight. Two empty chairs sat companionably near each other. The room filled as folks gathered for the final Tacoma Reads Author Event of 2025. This longstanding partnership between Tacoma Public Library and the City of Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards’ Office, this would be the mayor’s final Tacoma Reads as her eight years of service as mayor end soon.
City of Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards and Valarie Kaur, 10-16-2025.
The Tacoma Reads book and author?
“See No Stranger” by Valarie Kaur, a renowned civil rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, Sikh American, daughter, wife, and mother. She declares, “Revolutionary love is the call of our time.”
Mayor Woodards and Valarie sat side by side on stage, conversing as friends, intimate, warm, sharing questions and insights while the audience eavesdropped. We heard stories, prayers, and songs of origins, struggles, love, and hope.
Of this painful, frightening time we are in, Valarie asks,
“Is this the darkness of the tomb or of the womb?”
Invoking the intense, painful phase of labor before childbirth, she offers with clear-eyed hope, “What if this is our greatest transition?” And in this struggle, she encourages us to “hold hands, breath, and push” because “love is sweet labor.”
She called us to resist and also to reimagine, to “practice the world we want in the space between us.” After all, “We belong to one another.”
Yes, my heart responded.
“We recover this birthright by loving more bravely.”
Yes, so true.
“We do this even in the face of hardship and atrocity, choosing joy because joy cultivates the freedom the world won’t give us.”
Yes, with tears.
Then she asks, "What is possible if we see no stranger? What if instead, we look at others and say, ‘You are a part of me I do not yet know.’”
Her radical practice of Revolutionary Love fully embraces the complexity and challenge to extend that love to others, to our opponents, and to ourselves. Each of these loves is available to us to choose as we need, as we have capacity, as we are called. Her compass provides these options that “leave no one behind.” At the same time, she also doesn't expect those under duress to do what is not theirs to do right now. It is an invitation with wisdom and compassionate boundaries.
City of Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards and Valarie Kaur, 10-16-2025.
After basking in the warmth of their connection on stage, came a heartfelt tribute to the mayor, which included Valarie singing to her. Beautiful.
Afterward, I waited in line to thank her and to briefly share about our work. In two breaths, I told her about The Center for a Loving Workplace, about my research, about making the business case for Love, and renewing my vows for Love by rallying to “Tip the Planet from Fear to Love by 2035.”
She smiled, squeezed my arm, and said, “Oh, we are singing different parts of the same song!”
Smile. So kind. Uplifting. The encouragement my heart needed.
With Valarie Kaur, in Tacoma, 10-16-2025.
Valarie Kaur is “reclaiming Love as a force for justice.” Yes!!
You and I are reclaiming Love, too! Our work as Loving Leaders reclaims Love as our source for the workplace, and beyond.
We reclaim the Love that has been lost to us as children, taken by social pressure, by shaming, by gender roles, by bullying, by convenience, by trauma, by media, by religion, by masculine power that has no room for the feminine. Love has too often been taken from us and replaced by fear.
So that now, for so many, we are afraid of love, yet strangely comfortable with fear! Fear is familiar, and Love, alien, the very Love we need to survive and thrive. This is living in The Upside Down!
So day by day, you and I we are reclaiming Love as our source for work and leadership. It naturally expands in our lives, too.
What does it mean to “source love” at work? It means that when faced with a need, we are guided by love in our choices. When excited by opportunity, we ground in love to stay steady and wise. When confronted with a problem, we turn to love as the soil to root any solution. When pressured by systems, we cultivate habits of love as our go-to response.
If you take away anything from this blog, please hold onto this: That source love is yours. It's yours to experience and to freely give wherever you are, without shame or the need to justify why Love is the right thing to do. Of course, we Love.
What else would we do?
