Ahava, the Love That Builds (Twin Forces of Creation, Part II)
The Hebrew word for love is ahava.
The root is hav, which means to give. The word for love and the word for giving share the same bones, and the implications unspool from there: love is not something that happens to you. It is something you create through the act of giving. You cannot fall into it like a passive recipient, cannot fall out of it like a victim of circumstance. Love is a choice made manifest through action. The action is giving.
I learned this first through my faith, the way you learn anything that matters—as formation rather than information, something that shapes you before you fully understand it. The ancient marriage contract in Jewish tradition, the ketubah, does not ask two people to promise they will always feel a certain way. Feelings shift like the weather. What the ketubah asks is harder: a commitment to uphold a standard of presence and action, regardless of how you feel on any given day. The poetry is not in the words. It is in the life lived afterward, the daily act of showing up, the thousands of small givings that accumulate into something that deserves to be called love.
Building something that matters works the same way.
The Four Altars
When you truly build, which is not the same as producing, you are making offerings at four altars.
The first altar is the work itself. You lay down your attention, your care, your cognitive resources, the hours you could have spent elsewhere. The work costs something. It is supposed to cost something. That is how you know it is love. Ahava has always involved sacrifice—the natural shape of devotion.
The second altar is the audience. You create something for them, something that meets a need or answers a longing or makes their life different in some way. The work is more than self-expression. It is an offering placed where others can receive it.
The third altar is the future. You make something that will exist beyond you, that will continue giving after you have moved on. The work carries your imprint forward in time, a well that others will draw from long after you have finished pouring.
The fourth altar is yourself. You honor what you carry: your gifts, your perspective, your particular way of seeing. The work is an act of fidelity to what is yours to build. This altar is the one most often neglected. Women especially have been taught that pouring themselves out completely is the highest form of love. It is not. It is abandonment dressed as devotion. You cannot sustain the work without sustenance. You cannot keep giving if you refuse to receive.
These four altars are the dimensions of ahava, the measure of whether you are building from love or from something lesser. When all four are tended, the work becomes what it was meant to become.
The Craft and the Cost
I have an interdisciplinary degree in business, psychology, and religion. I have trained with some of the most respected strategists in the world. I know the frameworks. I can build a competitive positioning map, excavate a value proposition, diagnose why a brand is failing to resonate. I am well-versed in the rigor of my craft.
But when I sit with a client and contemplate the complexities of their entire world—their vision, their wounds, their unrealized potential—something happens that the frameworks cannot fully account for. I am tending all four altars at once. To the work: my full attention, my best thinking. To them: strategies and reframes that will change how they move through the world. To the future: a brand that will outlast our engagement. To myself: the honor of doing work that uses everything I am.
I did not always have language for this. But I know why I do this work. I keep meeting women trying to bring their ideas into the world. Spinning their wheels. Wasting money. Feeling like failures. Unable to get brilliant work in front of the right people. I want to end that cycle. I want to reflect to them what they cannot see clearly for themselves: validation, deeper understanding of their own importance, strategies that actually work.
That wanting is ahava.
The Circle
I am a Black woman in an industry dominated by white men.
I cannot hide what makes me different, cannot blend in and let the work speak first. My presence speaks before my work does. Doors that swing open for others have stayed shut for me until I found another way in.
The way I found was giving in public. I put my thinking out where people could see it because I understood that for someone who looks like me, visibility is not optional. I shared ideas that felt risky because they revealed how differently I see this work. I wrote essays. I started a podcast called Authenticity is Addictive.
Doors opened. Enough of them.
What I did not expect was what came back. People from all walks of life, approaching me quietly to say how much it meant to see someone like me doing this work. How my visibility gave them permission to do the work they love on their own terms. How watching me claim space helped them believe they could claim theirs.
I gave my thinking in public, and connection came back. The connection generated more giving. The giving deepened the connection.
This is how ahava builds.
The Mirror
Sometimes the most important thing you can give someone is the truth about their own love.
I once worked with a woman who reminded me of Queen Esther. Dark forces were gathering against her people, the community she had spent years educating and serving. She had the knowledge, the relationships, the credibility. Years of showing up had positioned her uniquely to lead.
And she wanted to quit.
She was exhausted. Wounded by peers. Frustrated by politics. Worn down by the weight of carrying something so valuable against such vehement opposition. She sat across from me and asked if she should shut it all down.
I told her she had the right to quit. And I meant it. No one is obligated to keep giving when the giving is destroying them.
And then I told her what the world would lose if she did.
She had poured love into her work for years. The love was still there. She had just lost sight of it under the weight of exhaustion and disappointment. I held the mirror. I showed her what she had built, what she was still building, what would not exist if she walked away.
She did not quit. She is still building.
The Counterfeit
There is a counterfeit that masquerades as ahava.
It is called obligation. It looks like commitment—the showing up, the discipline, the grind. But underneath, something essential is missing. The giving is happening, but it is draining instead of filling. It is hollowing you out instead of building you up.
Obligation feels like dragging yourself through processes that do not fit. Wearing shoes a size too small. Performing a role you were never meant to play. It says: this is how you win. Follow the trend. Use the blueprint. Do what worked for them.
But what worked for them may never work for you. When you build from obligation, you do not become successful. You become hollow. Disconnected from the very thing that made you want to build in the first place.
The audience can feel the difference. They sense when a brand exists because someone could not bear for it not to exist versus when it exists because a spreadsheet said it should. Obligation produces transactions. Ahava produces devotion.
The Fourth Altar
Obligation takes root when the fourth altar is neglected. And that neglect is due to a lie that many women believe.
It whispers that love and money are opposites. That if you truly cared about the work, you would do it for free. That charging what you are worth is extraction, exploitation, evidence that you do not really love the thing you are building.
This lie has kept brilliant women poor. It has kept necessary work unsustainable. It has convinced generous people that their generosity requires their own deprivation.
But ahava inverts the equation.
If love is giving, and building is making offerings at four altars—to the work, to the audience, to the future, to yourself—then sustaining the work is part of the love. The work needs resources to survive. It needs your energy, which requires rest. It needs tools and systems, which require money. It needs you at full capacity, not hollowed out by martyrdom.
Undercharging is abandoning the fourth altar while tending the other three. It is loving the audience and the future and the work itself while refusing to love yourself.
The woman who charges what her work is worth is honoring all four altars. She is protecting the work so it can continue. She is serving the audience with her full capacity instead of her exhausted scraps. She is building something that will outlast her. And she is treating herself as worthy of care—which she is, which you are, which we all are.
This is a corrective for the particular wound that tells women their love is only real if it costs them everything.
Love that destroys the lover isn't love at all.
Recognition
How do you recognize ahava when it is present?
Conviction. Expansion and weightiness at the same time, like being filled with something that has substance. Confirmation that you are exactly where you should be, even when you cannot prove it yet. Gratitude for being the one who gets to bring these ideas into existence.
Certainty that clarity will come as you continue to take action—as, not before. You do not need everything figured out. You need to begin, and the path illuminates itself one step at a time.
Fate. Blessing. Something that was waiting for you to claim it.
When I am building from ahava, I am sustained by the work even as I pour into it. That is the difference. That is how you know.
The Counterpart
But love has a twin. Ahava begins the work, but without its counterpart, love can curdle into self-indulgence—expecting the world to care simply because you do. There is another force, and it is the one that keeps love honest. It is called yirah: awe, reverence, the trembling recognition that you are handling something sacred.
That is where we will pick up in Part III.
Stay Curious,
