"Love is what you go through with someone."
~ Elenbarathi
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
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. ~ Nietzsche
while violence is practiced...in broad daylight.
~ John Lennon
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.
Tranquility in love is a disagreeable calm. - Moliere
Love gets people into difficulties, not out of them. - George Bernard Shaw
Paradoxically, we cannot navigate clearly within a relationship unless we can live without it. - Harriet G. Lerner
from plum flowers, mangoes ripening in the smoke of burning forests,
crones praying in the foamy sand at low tide, shocked waterfalls gracing
new housing developments, volcanoes drinking in the fragrance of the
stars. In your eyes I see everything that lives."
- mash-up of Pablo Neruda and Rob Brezsny
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
-James Hillman