Bandaid

Saw this on the way home last week. So cheerful.

Prisms of Love

It seems impossible to fully articulate love - such a powerful catch-all phrase, isn't it? Every once in a while, I peruse the ever-growing collection of my favorite attempts. Here are the ones that beamed me on today:

"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring."
~ Oscar Wilde

"But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things."
~ Vincent van Gogh

"Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love."
~ Erich Fromm

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."
~ Thomas Merton

"The most human thing we have to do in life is is to learn to speak our honest convictions and feelings and live with the consequences. This is the first requirment of love, and it makes us vulnerable to other people who may ridicule us. But our vulnerability is the only thing we can give to other people."
~ Leo F. Buscaglia

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi

"Love is not love until love's vulnerable."
~ Theodore Roethke

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."
~ Tom Robbins

"Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself."
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
~ C.S. Lewis

"You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip."
~ Jonathan Carroll

"Love is being stupid together."
~ Paul Valery

"To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."
~ Mary Oliver

"Love is like seaweed; even if you have pushed it away, you will not prevent it from coming back."
~ Nigerian Proverb

"Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls."
~ Kahlil Gibran

"You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving."
~ Anatole France

"The first duty of love is to listen."
~ Paul Tillich

"And besides, when you love somebody, you mustn't listen to what they say. They say things to hurt you because they're afraid of being hurt themselves. You must look at their eyes...and feel their hearts!"
~ Tennessee Williams

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything."
~ Katharine Hepburn

"Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed."
~ Laurell K Hamilton

"Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time."
~ Ani Difranco

"Love is like racing across the frozen tundra on a snowmobile which flips over, trapping you underneath. At night, the ice-weasels come."
~ Matt Groening

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives."
~ Bertrand Russell

"I hold it true, whatever befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. Being purged a fire sparkling in lovers eyes, being vexed a sea nourished with lovers tears, What is it else? A madness most discreet, A choking gall and a perserving sweet."
~ William Shakespeare

"The one who loves you will make you weep."
~ Argentine Proverb

"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love."
~ Washington Irving

"Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you're gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold."
~ Alice Hoffman

"Love is a serious mental disease."
~ Plato

"Love isn't finding a perfect person. It's seeing an imperfect person perfectly."
~ Sam Keen

"I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all."
~ Lord Byron

"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
~ Victor Hugo

"It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations"
~ Kahlil Gibran

"It is better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you are not."
~ Andre Gide

"Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul."
~ Saint Augustine

"Love is a better teacher than duty."
~ Albert Einstein

"The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."
~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi

"This is the true measure of love: When we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us."
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them."
~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
~ Anais Nin

"This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted."
~ C.S. Lewis

Art Gifts from My Boy

Feeling Hot

An older colleague walked into a conversation a few days ago. Without knowing the context - and it doesn't really matter - he heard me make reference to being hot.

"You think you're hot?" he asked (it seemed an overly-incredulous tone).

But here's the beauty. Here's the moment of insight.

Because even just a few years ago, such a comment would surely have hurted my feelin's.

But now? I just replied in the affirmative. Yup. Yeah. Of course!

I grew up thinking that no matter what I did I could never be good enough. I could never be perfect enough. I could never be smart enough. I could never be a boy! I could never be lovable. I could never be worthy of anything good - no matter how I tried, no matter what I did.

Now, with a boy of my own, I see. I was smart. I was pretty. I was talented. I was, in fact, very lovable. And I still am. More so now that I am freed of so many of those fears and insecurities.

And - I am *totally hot*!

What does that mean? I'm not an egoist or a narcissist. I know I don't have the looks or the charisma of a movie star or an incredible singer or actress. I don't have the hotness that seems to be valued via a pornesque lens in the common parlance.

But I'm hot to ME. I pay attention to the sensual pleasures of the moment. I appreciate all the various forms of beauty that surround me. I am grateful for my communion - in my own eclectic and sometimes overly-mystical way - with the cosmos. And because everything has its sensual and spiritual appeal, in one way or another, it rebounds back to me too.

And - at my age, finally - I feel a sparkle inside.

How can I explain it?

It's the love of complexity and life and reality as opposed to the paranoia and fear and projections. It's like the difference between Obama and Nixon.

When you've been on both sides, and have chosen, every moment is a kind of revelation. Fear really is the mind-killer.

Yes. I'm hot! And so are you.

Do you notice the little things that make each person unique? Is it possible to describe someone you care about without telling a story about them? Do you know - right now - that you'll always remember the people you care about in your life? Do you have that level of meta-dialogue with yourself?

If you do - it shines, it sparkles. Not always... but enough.

Pay attention. Appreciate. Be grateful.

Telling Stories to Myself

I love the way my mind presents me with stories.

At some point, I become a participant of sorts (complete with dialogue) but there are times when a reverie develops into a narrative with its own texture and context and depth before any meta-process seems to kick into play.

How is it that these waking dreams occur? I can get far into one before it seems to require much from my conscious self at all.

It's wonderful.

Snow!

More snow in Atlanta! Weeeeee!

The Snow that never drifts ~ Emily Dickinson

The Snow that never drifts --
The transient, fragrant snow
That comes a single time a Year
Is softly driving now --

So thorough in the Tree
At night beneath the star
That it was February's Foot
Experience would swear --

Like Winter as a Face
We stern and former knew
Repaired of all but Loneliness
By Nature's Alibit --

Were every storm so spice
The Value could not be --
We buy with contrast -- Pang is good
As near as memory --