Dixie Gillaspie sees through the smoke of battle caused by the recent Honey Maid commercial and explains the truth we all want to accept, but don’t know how.
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Khoobah, hibbak, ljubav, ai, liebe, amor, amour, sercha.
Every one of these combinations of letters causes spellcheck to freak out.
But according to Babblefish, they all mean one thing.
Love.
Which apparently makes some people freak out. When it’s presented in combinations they don’t recognize as right.
When people freak out they do more than add a red squiggly line that suggests that just maybe, you might want to change something. They spew hate and fear into your inbox and all over the internet.
Honey Maid recently made a lot of people freak out with a short commercial they ran featuring families both traditional and non. See the New Yorker article which tells that story here.
I’m sure the resulting hate mail came as no surprise to them. They might have even had their response laid out before they launched the ad that started the media storm.
But I doubt that even the best marketing team could have predicted the outpouring of love that came in response to their video of two artists at work.
Watch the original Honey Maid commercial which sparked all this debate here
It wasn’t because the artists were doing anything never seen before. In fact, their art installation was so simple, on the surface, that it might have been a grade school art project. They rolled up printed copies of all the hate-filled tweets, the threatening emails, the fearful rants, and they glued the rolls of paper together to form a shape.
That shape spelled a word. A word that was an answer, and a transformation.
Love.
But the artists were not finished. They still had reams and reams of paper left to work with. And printed on each sheet was a message of support, of gratitude, of love.
And they rolled these sheets of paper too, and used them to surround their word until what we see at the end is LOVE in an elegant script, standing high in a drift of column after column of paper.
(I don’t think it was an accident that they rolled the hateful messages with the words facing in, reflecting on themselves, and rolled the loving messages with the words facing out, reflecting into the world around them.)
Finally the video sums up their position, in one simple sentence.
“Proving that only one thing really matters when it comes to family.”
“Love.”
The comments on social media have been eerily and joyfully similar.
“Love trumps”
“Love triumphs”
“Love wins”
“Love conquers all.”
One word, showing up over, and over.
Love.
That’s why it does not matter if Honey Maid intended to foster love, or profits. By choosing to transform words of hate and fear into that single word, and to surround it in a sea of other positive words, Honey Maid has offered the world a vibrational change with the power to reprogram our individual makeup.
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I ask my clients to be highly intentional about the words they choose. Because words have power, words have resonance, words, science now suggests, are the key to changing the pattern of our very DNA!
(Russian scientists have published study results that suggest that the patterns of human language are based on the patterns of our DNA, and that language can be used, almost like computer code, to “reprogram” our DNA.)
That’s why it does not matter if Honey Maid intended to foster love, or profits. By choosing to transform words of hate and fear into that single word, and to surround it in a sea of other positive words, Honey Maid has offered the world a vibrational change with the power to reprogram our individual makeup.
And that vibration has spread. Like a rippling echo of a single heartbeat, that vibration has made spirits lift in hope, joy, and love.
But there is another word that they ask us to examine.
Family.
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Many years ago I wrote a little piece as a eulogy offering for someone who was not related to me by blood, but who understood what it meant to be family.
Family, I think, is not made of bone and blood
Of shared ancestors and childhood homes.
It is made of people and stories
Of shared experiences and loveFamily is made of bonds that cannot be broken
Regardless of time or distance
Or what life gives us, or what death takes awayFamily, I think, is made of
What we are willing to share together
And what, together, we are able to bear.
Seeing Honey Maid’s offering, I realized that the experience of family at that funeral was far more than what, together, we were able to bear.
It was also what, together, we were choosing to celebrate.
The conversation surrounding this video is not about sex. It isn’t about sexual preference or sexual orientation. It isn’t about sexual identity or biological gender.
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At the heart of all that were sharing, both the burdens and the celebrations, was LOVE.
We didn’t love because we were born into the same human family. We were family because we loved.
In that space, we were souls loving other souls, even as our human arms held each other in silent comfort and our human voices shared memories of the physical life of the soul that had passed from the material plane. And that recognition of connected spirit made us family regardless of our genetic DNA.
The conversation surrounding this video is not about sex. It isn’t about sexual preference or sexual orientation. It isn’t about sexual identity or biological gender.
Neither is this a conversation about tolerance, or acceptance, or even inclusion.
And, in spite of the theme of the ad that started it all, this is not a conversation about “Wholesomeness.”
This is a conversation about wholeness, spiritual and physical.
About family.
About love.
Because family isn’t born of blood and bone.
Family isn’t a male husband and female wife and 2.5 biological children per household.
Family is not a word to be defined by the majority.
Family is a choice.
Because love is a choice.
Choose love.
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Photo Credit: Flicker/Purple Sherbet Photography