1/7 Joh Toh Prem: a photo series on real love. As a community, we aren’t the best at keeping our marriages together nor are we the best at vocalising the abuse in the home. There’s a vacuum of lovelessness and love is almost embarrassing for most of us to even talk about. If it ever is, it’s mentioned as a magical vague ’thing’ in the air brought into our lives through luck and pixie dust. What is love, does it exist in our lives and what is its importance?
2/7 Joh Toh Prem: a photo series on real love. Disney was the first place love was described to me. My early memories of love were through the eyes of Simba in the Lion King, when he finds his life-lion, Nala. I learnt how love was written in destiny and how you find love when you find your soul mate. Later in my teen years, the phrase ‘I love you’ was the ultimate phrase you said to people you cared about. If you weren’t too sure, you might say ‘i luv u’ but the notion behind it was still powerful.
3/7 Joh Toh Prem: a photo series on real love. I love how M.Scott Peck’s ‘The Road Less Travelled’ defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. Love is a self-discipline rather than a passion or feeling. Peck rejects the myth of romantic love, and also rejects love in the form of dependency (which does not foster growth of the other) and self-sacrifice (which can be masochistic tolerance of abuse). Love is attentive, courageous; and willing to loss, independence and confrontation.
4/7 Joh Toh Prem: a photo series on real love. The feminist bell hooks (lower case like rupi kaur) took me further with her book ‘All About Love’, which describes love itself as being a mix between “various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust; as well as honest and open communication”. Hooks showed me how love heals wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation (final post in series will explain) and how love holds the power to overcome anything.
5/7 Joh Toh Prem: a photo series on real love. Now we have some idea of what love is, how do we receive it? I found a basic framework by reading ‘The Five Love Languages’, by Gary Chapman. He outlined five ways to express and experience love: 1) gifts; 2) quality time; 3) words of affection; 4) acts of service; and 5) physical touch. For whatever reason, each person reacts differently to each one of the languages; some are extremely powerful and some mean nothing. The writer acknowledges we all need love, but it needs to come in the language we understand. Generally, if you like to give in a particular language, you’ll probably enjoy receiving in the same one. This gave me a system of communication to decode the endless, cryptic, loving actions around me.
6/7 Joh Toh Prem: a photo series on real love. The title of this photo series is from one of the most quoted lines of Gurbani which states the importance of destroying all inhibitions, or literally ‘removing one’s head’, in order to love. ਜਉ ਤਉ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਖੇਲਣ ਕਾ ਚਾਉ ॥ ਸਿਰੁ ਧਰਿ ਤਲੀ ਗਲੀ ਮੇਰੀ ਆਉ ॥ In ‘Fighting for Faith and Nation’, anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood interviews Sikh freedom fighters, or Kharkus and dedicates an entire chapter to love, recalling how regardless of their AK-47s, Sikhs fighters were “regularly described as ‘gentle’ and ’full of love’”. One Kharku recommends Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Sea of Love’ to really understand how martyrdom is like “drowning in a sea of love”. Another freedom fighter states “it is a bond of love…not only to my brothers and sisters of the Panth, but to all human beings”.
7/7 Joh Toh Prem: a photo series on real love Our upbringings and cultural norms have confused us. We speak of love in every day language: we love this, love him, love her, love the Guru, love the world; but we need to explore it more in our personal lives, our families and as a community. The more we do so, the stronger the likelihood for people to find the right partner, create a home of revolutionary love and fight for freedom together. Nurture your own growth and those around you. Be love, to find the Beloved. (get it, be-love-d, means you’ll be loved, to find the Beloved).
My Don father-in-law gifted me a 35mm film camera from the 1980s and I’ve taken a bunch of photos to share with you all. I’ll release them in a photo-series exploring True Love titled Jo Toh Prem.
NARVISION 
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