Water flows deep below the surface of the earth. It circulates. We need it to live. It passes in and out of us. We take it in. We give it back. A SOURCE is a point at which the water flowing below becomes accessible to us, a point where the deep surfaces, a point of harvesting from the flow. Imagine that water is Love. The animating matter of all life.
​
For that reason - an study of love must be integrated in life and through direct experience. ​
La SOURCE is an international and interdisciplinary research and art residency center dedicated to "Love-Studies". This is not yet a recognized field of research. We are planting a seed.
Love. We have long said, as a human species, that love will save us, unite us, heal us, teach us, guide us... and we believe it has done so since the beginning of civilization.
Love has united humanity across all barriers - language, country border, culture, time - as the most persistent human fixation. But what exactly do we mean by “Love”? Do we all mean the same thing? If 'all we need is love', it might be helpful to discuss what precisely it is, or even to collect and share our many possible definitions and understandings. Furthermore, it could be helpful to know how to work with it, to call it into action, to cultivate it, and to put it into active practice in the world.
As humans, we seem to research everything we think is most important. Maybe it’s time to make Love - this force that has transcended even the limits of time and space - the subject of collective and intensive research and creation. Maybe it’s time to take Love seriously.
Musicians, novelists, artists, philosophers, theologians, social scientists, ecologists, even neurochemists (and others in so many disciplines) are all asking relevant questions about Love. La SOURCE exists to welcome them all in the same place to ask these questions together, to share our discoveries, and to create new methods for including this understanding of Love in the shaping of the future.
So to answer your concerns - no, the study of Love is NOT:
sentimental
idealistic
naive
frivolous
blind
silly
moralistic
easy
dogmatic
fanciful
irrelevant
lighthearted
ridiculous
new-agey
propagandist
banal
absurd
approximate
escapist
cute
impossible
... though it can also be all of these things. Because the study of love will also help us understand why we face these persistent resistances to such a clearly common ground.
The word Love may create resistances. That's understandable. It is dangerous-hot and saturated with memories. It is confusing and volatile. Love can feel somehow untouchable by language. And at the same time, we hear it every day. It is common. Gimmicky. Overhyped. And suspect.
​
Maybe you wonder if we're some sheltered and misguided bunch of utopists asking you to set down your critical mind and join a self-indulgent, self-proclaimed revolution.
​
One thing is sure. Love cannot be understood theoretically. It must be lived and explored through experience. So at La SOURCE, we do exactly that. We live. Together. We experiment, question, create and study together. With the trust that reflective, curious, disciplined and open minds can source new tools, new methods, new insights and a new vision that can guide us forward. As individuals, and as a connected whole.
Integrative inquiry is our main modus operandi. This is an invitation to all seemingly-incompatible, contradictory (inner/outer) voices to join as necessary, vital complements in the effort to shape a profoundly inspired and responsible vision of the world - and who we are (called to be) in it.
The primary principle is simple: everything is relevant.
INTEGRATIVE INQUIRY
shaping vision...
You may have noticed that we are a center for both research AND creation. These two, moving perpetually in alternance and entanglement - the hunger for understanding, and the enthusiasm for shaping life - are intimate partners in a purpose-driven practice. Thus their integration is of utmost significance. Furthermore, these two partners contain both an inwardly and outwardly reaching orientation - which also ask to be equally valued. ​
​
Archetypally, this might mean:
The seeker's quest for understanding focuses on sourcing insight through heightened states of awareness, self-observation, and discerning the various motions of the spirit (another way of naming the sense of aliveness or connectivity).
The researcher strives towards precising a contextualized perception, analyzing information, and by gathering knowledge of their subject of study.
​
Inner and outer; both are necessary and complementary components to in/forming an understanding of existence.
The artist engages creative practice as a space of freedom, mobilizing an exploratory field of expression, listening and responding to inner needs while striving for authenticity.
​​
Though it is rarely understood as a creative practice, the activist engages from a space of service, listening and responding to the needs of the world. This altruism can be understood as art, in that it sculpts the social and environmental scene of life and culture.
​​​​
Inner and outer; both are necessary and complementary components to the creating of experience.
These may appear as separate fields of interest and action. They are at least commonly treated as independently functioning domains of concern with separate, often incompatible methodologies and aims. Integrative inquiry is an effort to invite each orientation to the table with a conviction that merging them will produce a rich, efficient, responsible, inspired and informed _________( you decide )_________.