Just Be Love

My old band Gazer recorded a song called Just Be Love in 2004. Mikal Moore wrote it. The chorus asks a question: why can't we just be love? It was asking the same thing John Lennon asked, just from a different room. We knew that then. Years later I rewrote the verses and re-recorded it, keeping a lot of the original music as a way of honoring the people I made it with. The chorus stayed because the chorus was already right.

I knew what the song was about when we played it. I just hadn't watched the answer fail enough times yet.

I've watched the same thing happen in every room I've ever been in. A band gets momentum and the people around it start grabbing. Not the audience. Not the strangers. The people closest to it. Management. Label contacts. The momentum doesn't die from the outside. It dies in the hallway after the show.

I watched it happen in churches. Places that say out loud, every week, that they exist to love people. Then they forsake the thing they claim to be, align with waves of hate and political absurdity, and call it faith. The room that was supposed to be the safest one turns out to be the most dishonest.

I've watched it happen everywhere people organize around something worth building. Someone puts real work into a thing that solves a problem. A community initiative. A local movement. A piece of legislation that would actually help. And someone closer to the levers rewrites it. Gates it. Claims it or shuts it down because it didn't come from them. Not because the work is bad. Because the work is good and they didn't make it. The insecurity shows up the same way every time. The quiet after they tell you to stop.

It's the same pattern every time. The work is not the problem. The proximity to the work is the problem. Something gets built and the people closest to it start calculating what it means for them instead of what it means for the people it was built for.

A prison made of thoughts unspoken. Mikal wrote that line twenty years ago. I didn't fully understand it until I lived it enough times. The thoughts aren't complicated. They're just: this is good, let it move, get out of the way. Simple. But saying that out loud means admitting you're in the way. And that costs something. So the thoughts stay unspoken and the prison stays locked and the work sits in a drawer or gets rewritten with someone else's name on it or dies in a meeting where the agenda was protection dressed up as strategy.

I keep thinking about what it looks like without the pattern. Not a fantasy. Just the ordinary version where someone builds something and the first response is: good, keep going. Where the handoff is clean and nobody rewrites it on the other side. Where trust is the starting position instead of something you earn past every gatekeeper on every floor. Where the person in the room who sees the problem and builds the fix is treated like the asset they are instead of the threat they appear to be.

It's not complicated. It never was. The song asked the question in four words. Why can't we just be love. Meaning: why can't we just get out of the way. Why can't the work be the thing that matters instead of the feelings of the people who didn't make it. Why can't proximity to something good make people better instead of worse.

I don't have the answer. I've been in too many rooms to believe it's coming. But I know what it looks like when it's absent. I've seen the cost enough times to describe it in my sleep. And I know that every time I've built something real, the biggest obstacle was never the work itself. It was the space between the work and the people it had to pass through to matter.

Mikal wrote it twenty years ago asking a question people have been asking for longer than either of us have been alive. I added my own take on the verses and sang it. I've spent the time since watching every room I've been in refuse to answer it.