Love

 

I want so badly some days
to be the kind of person who keeps a gratitude journal

and believes in manifestations, who believes
that if I throw myself on the mercy of the universe

the universe will be merciful, that happiness is as simple
as mirror work, which people tell me is not easy,

because who can look in the mirror for three minutes
and say I love you, I love you, I love you

without bursting into tears over all the ways
we have not loved ourselves.

Jennifer Saunders, from When the Guest Speaker Told Us

A Gift

 

The middle of June, and I awake
to rain - gentle, persistent, enough
to soak the  ground and clear  the air.
 
Isn't this the best kind of surprise-
the thing you wanted but couldn't get
for yourself and didn't know
that you could have? Already
the frogs are singing and the grass
stretches its roots in rejoicing.
 
And here am I, with my damp hair
and empty hands, and nothing to say
but "Oh!" and "Thank you!"
 
Once again the world - my one
true love - has brought me flowers.
 
Lynn Ungar, 9 Jun 2023

Walking Ahead

Am I walking a little ahead of you 

so that no snake will bite

your sandalled foot? 

John Berger

Page 44, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', 

No one should accept the whole of us. We're appalling! :)

"You probably believe that when somebody tries to tell you something about yourself that is a little ticklish and a little uncomfortable, they are attacking you. They are not. They are trying to make you into a better person. And we don't tend to believe that this has a role in love.

We tend to believe that true love means accepting the whole of us. It doesn't. No one should accept the whole of us. We're appalling! You really want the whole of you accepted? No, that's not love. The full display of our characters, the full articulation of who we are, should not be something that we do in front of anyone we care about.

So what we need to do is to accept that the other person is going to want to educate us. And that it isn't a criticism. Criticism is merely the wrong word we apply to a much nobler idea, which is to try and make us into better versions of ourselves. But we tend to reject this idea very strongly."

Minute 11, 'Mating Minds — Alain de Botton on Attachment Styles and the Art of Compromise'

Duration: 15.58 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLNaKCk_Pjo 

How we stand in the middle of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Relearning

The world doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to be loved. That’s how you save it.
          -Richard Brendan

And isn’t that the way it is—
the truth that opened me yesterday
now puts me in shackles. Whatever
I knew about saving the world
must be lost. Today, the only truth
is the invitation to fall in love
with the world as it is.

Fall in love with the thorn, the sting, the loss,
the ringing in the ears after the shot.
Fall in love with all I’d rather not.
Easier when it’s metaphor. Harder
when it’s wound. Hate. Anger.
Dark snarl of contempt hurled in the face.
Harder when love feels far away.

There’s only one way then to save
the world. How we stand in the middle
of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2019/06/08/relearning/  

Falling more deeply in love with the world...

On the Winter Solstice

...On this longest night, it’s so clear—
the truest reason to write at all is to fall
more deeply in love with the world,

with its trees and its drizzle
and its stubborn shine and its
relentless hunger and its corners
that will never ever see the growing light.

Fall in love with the octopus that can detach
an arm on purpose and then grow it back again.

Fall in love with the elusive lynx
and the crooked forest and the frazzle ice
tinkling in the San Miguel River.

Fall in love even with this profoundly flawed
species that, despite all its faults,
is still capable of falling more deeply,
more wildly in love.

Rosemerry Trommer

And suddenly all that matters

Walking Through the Prehistoric Journey Exhibit

And again I recall how small we are,
how ninety nine percent of all species
that have ever lived are extinct,
how thin our stripe in geologic time,
how remarkable that we are here at all.

And suddenly all that matters
is that I love you—and what are the odds?
How many billion years in the making,
this rush of gratitude, this burgeoning
joy, this thrill in the sheer Cenozoic luck
to feel the concurrent burning and quenching,
the simultaneous bite and salve, the Quaternary
gift of thriving and failing at the same time?

If it feels as if it’s taken forever to get to this place,
lover, it has. Think trilobite. T-rex. Cave bear.
Wooly mammoth. Think how little time
has passed, and how lucky, how lucky we are.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2018/07/08/walking-through-the-prehistoric-journey-exhibit/

The Choice between Bitterness and Generosity

There are people who give what they themselves have not received. As Michael Ondaatje said, "There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not.” The choice is ours.

Yet another amazing story from The Humans of Bombay:

“I lost my mother when I was 5 years old. Those days were hard — my sister went off to boarding school and I was raised at my aunt’s house — but I missed my mother terribly. You know, if it’s your own mother, anytime you’re hungry you can say, ‘Mumma, I’m hungry’ and she’ll make something for you — but I grew up eating at strict meal times, craving my mother’s hand food.

I led a normal life after — went to school, Technical college, worked at a catering company in Libya after and then moved to Bombay in 1987. I established a real estate business in Borivali and an agency of about 250 nurses and ward boys that look after the elderly. Life was good — my son was settled and my wife and I were happy, but something at the back of my mind kept bothering me — the memories from my childhood didn’t leave. I kept telling my wife that I need to do something more to sleep well at night and after a few discussions she said, ‘why don’t we try and do something for the senior citizens who don’t have the luxury of a hot, home cooked meal?’ Having lost my mother at such an early age, I couldn’t imagine her not having a hot meal, when she was old and needed it the most.

Within a few days, my wife and I located 5 senior citizen couples who were in very bad shape and told them that from November 14th, 2013 they would have nothing to worry about and that we would deliver their meals to them. With 5000 Rupees and a heart full of love — my wife and I began our journey. Within the first week we knew that we would do this forever — the joy we had while watching them lick their fingers and sleep on a full stomach was unparalleled.

Since then, we deliver food to 56 senior citizens every day — we’ve hired two cooks who wake up at 5:30 every morning and along with my wife make about 300 chapatis everyday! Together, we don’t just prepare food; it’s soul food – with less salt, less oil, less ghee, in order to suit their special needs. We’re simple people, with simple needs — we operate out of our 1BHK home and use all our savings towards this without any regrets. What are we going to do with a bigger house or putting our money in the stock market? What about the people living today? What about those who raised us? When we can help out an old helpless couple whose maid ran away, or senior citizens abandoned by their own children— it is a life well lived…a life worth living.”

From here: https://www.facebook.com/humansofbombay/photos/a.188058468069805.1073741828.188056068070045/739376439604669/?type=3&theater

Kindness

"It's not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are - beneath the bluster - intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful and in search of consolation and forgiveness.

We're well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we're slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealized potential.

We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another. "

Page 119, 'The Course of Love', Alain de Botton

Love

​"The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximum generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behaviours.

The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief and the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation - and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship - is its charity.

Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don't accuse them of being mean or self-pitying, we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that hunger, a tricky digestive tract or a lack of sleep may have on mood.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships - if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love."​

Page 110, 'The Course of Love', Alain de Botton

A drop of your love

"Just because a drop of your love had blended in
I drank down the entire bitterness of life."

The original, in Punjabi:

Rall gai si es vich ik boond tere ishq di
Esse layi main zindagi di saari kudattan pee layi

Amrita Pritam

http://scroll.in/article/815278/the-story-of-amrita-pritams-final-love-poem

Album: https://goo.gl/photos/6hpXbpV9S9HD3HqP6

The opposite of this inattention is love

"I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself.

The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery."

Anne Truitt on Compassion, Humility, and How to Cure Our Chronic Self-Righteousness

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/

I cradle your heart

Two Tendernesses

while I shovel
and fold clothes and wash
bowls and chop
yellow peppers, all day with both hands
I cradle your heart

*

while I am walking
you are all around me,
you go on as far as I can see —
I have no stars to offer you,
you hold me, anyway

Rosemerry Trommer

Energy

The older I get, the more I understand the importance of having multiple sources of energy -  especially sources outside human relationships. Like solitude, paying attention to the universe. Like sunlight through leaves, trees changing with the seasons, the delight of birdsong, the abundant joy of squirrels, the dreaminess of cows - :) :) - not to mention music, poetry, art, gardening - anything that helps you create or experience beauty, peace. Anything that lifts you out of your ponderous self.

"When love first happens, the individuals are giving each other energy unconsciously and both people feel buoyant and elated. That's the incredible high we call being ‘in love.’

Unfortunately, once they expect this feeling to come from another person, they cut themselves off from the energy in the universe and begin to rely even more on the energy from each other -- only now there doesn’t seem to be enough and so they stop giving each other energy and fall back into their dramas in an attempt to control each other and force the other’s energy their way."

James Redfield

Milosz says it best:

A day so happy: http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.in/2014/02/a-day-so-happy.html

There is nothing more pathetic than caution

Moments

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.

Your heart is beating, isn't it?
You are not in chains, are you?

There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life
even, possibly, your own.

'Felicity', Mary Oliver

How can this be, but it is

 
























Love
From 'Felicity', Mary Oliver

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I will meet you there.

Rumi

Everything That Was Broken

Everything that was broken has
forgotten its brokenness. I live
now in a sky-house, through every
window the sun. Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories. Earthy
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in
it whose name is Forever.

I Don't Want to Lose

I don't want to lose a single thread
from the intricate brocade of this happiness.
I want to remember everything.
Which is why I'm lying awake, sleepy
but not sleepy enough to give it up.

Just now, a moment from years ago:
the early morning light, the deft, sweet
gesture of your hand
reaching for me.

No, I'd Never Been to this Country

No, I'd never been to this country
before. No, I don't know where the roads
would lead me. No, I didn't intend to
turn back.