We may tell ourselves that love is not really available. but the deeper truth is that we don't entirely trust it, and therefore have a hard time fully opening to it or letting it all the way into us. This disconnects us from our own heart, exacerbating our sense of love's scarcity. ~~ John Welwood

 

 

 

ego cooks and melts down in the heat of love’s influence, a beautiful evolutionary development starts to emerge—the genuine person, who embodies a quality of very human relational presence that is transparent to open-hearted being, righuuuuuuu

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

Love is a punishment.  Wea re punished for not being able to stay alone.  -Marguerite Yourcenar

To love someone deeply gives your strength.
Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.
 ~ Lao-tzu

 

I ran up the door
closed the stairs
said my pajamas
and put on my prayers
turned off the bed
and jumped into the light
     all because you kissed me goodnight

(anon. from an old catalog at 4832 colfax ave)

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

yyyy

"Love yourself so much that you will never love another any less." ~ Sara

 

“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
-James Hillman

 

“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
-James Hillman

“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
-James Hillman

 

Love is not manageable, it is simply something that happens, and the moment you try to manage it everything misfires.

Trees are in love with the earth; the earth is in love with the trees. The birds are in love with the trees; the trees are in love with the birds. The earth is in love with the sky; the sky is in love with the earth. The whole existence exists in a great ocean of love. Let love be your worship, let love be your prayer.

OSHO

"Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you."

Wayne Dyer

 

"Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. We turn inward and begin to feed upon our own personalities, and little by little we destroy ourselves. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others."~ Chief Dan George~

---

 Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.' -- Erich Fromm

 

 You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her. -- Anonymous

To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten. Thomas Chandler

 Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice.-- Nora Roberts

Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible - John Welwood

As the defensive/controlling ego cooks and melts down in the heat of love’s influence, a beautiful evolutionary development starts to emerge—the genuine person, who embodies a quality of very human relational presence that is transparent to open-hearted being, right in the midst of the dense confines of worldly conditioning.
John Welwood, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_t-dHXLqdaUJ:www.shambhalasun.com/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26task%3D%26id%3D3398%26Itemid%3D244%26limit%3D9%26limitstart%3D243+%22charnel+ground+quality+of+relationship%22&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

 

"What is love? Love is between you and you. It is an experience of oneself with oneself. Your 'soul mate' is your own soul". Yogi Bhajan

 

 

I used to write love poems, now I collect them like small shells on a beach only the locals know about.

There is nothing inside them. They are empty.

But when you put your ear to their opening and really listen, you can hear the ocean.

- Mitch Ditkoff  http://www.ideachampions.com/heart/

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.
-Tom Robbins

 

 

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

 

"As you go out, you come in, you always come into center, bringing the clay into center; you press down, squeeze up, press one hand into the other, bringing your material into center.... We bring our self into a centering function, which brings it into union with all other elements. This is love. This is destruction of ego, in that its partialities are sacrificed to wholeness. Then the miracle happens: when on center, the self feels different: one feels warm..., in touch, the power of life a substance like an air in which one lives and has one's being with all other things, drinking it in and giving it off, at the same time quiet and at rest within it."
M.C.Richards

(from The Sun #160: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/160/uniting_the_opposites)

 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


"Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch.
None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have
to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love.
Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for
love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and
unity."
- Henri Nouwen

"Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and
shake all the nonsense out."
- Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

complete piece here:

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

......

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,

He would just drag you around the room

By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world

That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly

And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,

And with others,

Causing the world to weep

On too many fine days,

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself

And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants

To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down

And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a "playful drunken mood"

Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town

-- Hafiz (Translation by Daniel Ladinksy)
 

 

 

~~~~~~~~

 

"We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and
the jar that pours. I want to hold you close like a lute, so that we can cry
out with loving. Would you rather throw stones at a mirror? I am your
mirror and here are the stones."
- Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

"I love you between shadow and soul. I love you as the plant that hasn't
bloomed yet, and carries hidden within itself the light of flowers. I love
you without knowing how, or when, or from where. Because of you, the
dense fragrance that rises from the earth lives in my body, rioting with
hunger for the eternity of our victorious kisses."
- Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott

"The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what
causes love ultimately to fall over dead."
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without
imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail
not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped
imagining."
- James Hillman

"Your face is true and your hair is perfect and I love you. You make boats
in my dreams and you speak without words and I love you. Your fears
unnerve me and your questions amuse me and I love you.  I love you not
only for who you are, but for the interesting person I become when I'm
with you. I say I love you and love you and love you until the words
become the constant song of your voice in my head and the original ache
of memory in my soul. I love you more than life and death, more than
everything that's in between the light and the dark. Do you believe me?
Try harder. Do you believe me now? I'm always with you, which is why I
know you will never abandon yourself."
- *PRONOIA*

Love is the cure
For your pain will keep giving birth to more pain
Until your eyes constantly exhale love
As effortlessly as your body yields its scent
-Rumi

....For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth....
- Kahil Gibran

"When we find someone whose weirdness is
compatible with ours," wrote author Robert Fulghum, "we join up with
them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness -- and call it love."

"The person one loves never really exists,"
said Arthur C. Clarke, "but is a projection focused through the lens of the
mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion."

Gertrude Stein defined love as "the skillful
audacity required to share an inner life."

"You belong to love as wheels belong to roads, as grapes belong to
the blossoming of taste, as corn belongs to crows, as shadows belong to
the ache of heat, as happiness belongs to the capricious pangs of the
soul." -- Wolff Bowden

For one human being to love another is the most difficult task of all. It's the work for which all other work is mere preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Tranquility in love is a disagreeable calm. - Moliere

Love gets people into difficulties, not out of them.  - George Bernard Shaw

 

People commonly think they want a relationship, but there is no such thing as "a relationship". There is only relationship. There is no relationship when you have "a relationship".

Lee Lozowick, Alchemy of Love & Sex, page 117

Paradoxically, we cannot navigate clearly within a relationship unless we can live without it. - Harriet G. Lerner

 

Forget relationships and learn how to relate. In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating not a relationship. If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more. But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.

 -Osho

 

Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire.

Teilhard de Chardin

 

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.

Leo Tolstoy

 

Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong

 

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.

Leo Tolstoy

 

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.

Robert Quillen

 

ACCEPT - the secret of a good marriage. Attraction Communication Commitment Enjoyment Purpose Trust

Unknown

When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

Joseph Campbell

 

Marriage is more than finding the right person. It is being the right person.

Unknown

 

There is nothing you can do, achieve or buy that will outshine the peace, joy, and happiness of being in communion with the partner you love.

Drs. Evelyn and Paul Moschetta

 

Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.

H.L. Mencken

 

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.

Rumi

 

 

Let there be spaces in your togetherness

Kahlil Gibran

 

There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.

From the film Don Juan DeMarco

 

The kind of marriage you make depends upon the kind of person you are. If you are a happy, well-adjusted person, the chances are your marriage will be a happy one. If you have made adjustments so far with more satisfaction than distress, you are likely to make your marriage and family adjustments satisfactorily. If you are discontented and bitter about your lot in life, you will have to change before you can expect to live happily ever after.

Evelyn Duvall and Reuben Hill

 

Love is no assignment for cowards.

Ovid

 

The loving are the daring.

Bayard Taylor

 

I have no way of knowing whether or not you married the wrong person, but I do know that many people have a lot of wrong ideas about marriage and what it takes to make that marriage happy and successful. I'll be the first to admit that it's possible that you did marry the wrong person. However, if you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up having married the right person after all. On the other hand, if you marry the right person, and treat that person wrong, you certainly will have ended up marrying the wrong person. I also know that it is far more important to be the right kind of person than it is to marry the right person. In short, whether you married the right or wrong person is primarily up to you.

Zig Ziglar

 

Marriage isn't supposed to make you happy - and satisfied. It's your job to make your marriage happy - and satisfying. Same goes for sex. It isn't supposed to make you passionate and "hot". It's up to you to make it passionate and "hot" and intimate.

Diane Sollee

 

Marriage is not just spiritual communion; it is also remembering to take out the trash.

Joyce Brothers

 

Real giving is when we give to our spouses what's important to them, whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not.

Michele Weiner-Davis

 

They do not love who do not show their love.

William Shakespeare

 

We are, each of us, angels with only one wing, and we can only fly embracing each other.

Luciano DeCrescenzo

 

Marriage is not just spiritual communion; it is also remembering to take out the trash.

Joyce Brothers

 

Real giving is when we give to our spouses what's important to them, whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not.

Michele Weiner-Davis

 

They do not love who do not show their love.

William Shakespeare

 

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.

Sam Keen

 

You have to do it by yourself. You can not do it alone.

Thich Nhat Hanh

A PAGE OF RILKE QUOTES:

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke

“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other”

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke


A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
Rainer Maria Rilke

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
Rainer Maria Rilke

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Rainer Maria Rilke

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
Rainer Maria Rilke

 

“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
-James Hillman