“Love After Love.” A Poem. A Feast.

Tags

Derek Walcott, inspiration, life, literature, Love, poetry

Gertrude Fiske (1868 – 1961) American Impressionist

Love After Love

by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Many thanks to Ken Chawkin and the bread crumbs he left that led me to this poem on his blog Uncarved Block.

Reading it moved me deeply. One wonders if the whole purpose of our life journey is to lead us to that place where we see ourselves, finally, “face to face,” and greet ourselves with love and elation in this ultimate homecoming.

Ken describes his own tender home-coming on his website and provides many interesting links about Walcott, the Nobel Prize winning poet and artist.

In the video below you can listen to Walcott reading his poem from his island home on St. Lucia. You don’t want to miss this.

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Virtual Love-Making, Why We Blog

Tags

Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, Entertainment, inspiration, Louis Armstrong, Love, Love-making, Science, writing

Often when I leave comments on a blog posts that moved me, I write “I love this post” or “I love the way you do [this]” or “I love that quotation.” Lately I’ve been wondering if I’m overusing the word “love”.

Am I really feeling this strong emotional attachment, or am I just being lazy, unwilling to take the time to precisely articulate what strikes me about a particular piece?

After reading an article in The Atlantic on the science behind love, I’m inclined to believe that, more often than not, I use the word “love” because that’s what I’m actually feeling– a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.”   That’s how Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do.

In The Atlantic article “There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science), author Emily Esfahani Smith writes:

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.”

So when I say I “love” Louis Armstrong’s song, now I know why—because I feel such a strong positive connection to what he’s saying, as well as with how he says it, and the music he says it with, that I experience a triple love-whammy!

What I feel when reading things by fellow bloggers, or see the images they’ve created, is similar—a deeply-felt resonating connection, often on several levels.

In “Tao and Creativity” Chang Chung-yuan describes this connection between poet and reader as a “spiritual rhythm.”  It is the means by which the reader participates in the inner experience of the poet. He writes:

In other words, the reader is carried into the rhythmic flux and is brought to the depth of original indeterminacy from which the poetic pattern emerges.  The reader is directly confronted with the objective reality which the poet originally faced. The subjectivity of the reader and the objective reality of the poem interfuse . . . .

This is very interesting because Fredrickson discovers a similar phenomenon when she compares the brainwaves of a storyteller and listeners. Smith describes this in her article:

 What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the story—if he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got it—his brain activity actually anticipated the story-teller’s in some cortical areas.

“The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which ‘is a single act, performed by two brains,’” as Fredrickson writes in her book.

Fredrickson also discovered that the capacity to experience these daily love connections in our lives can be increased through simple loving-kindness meditations, where, as Smith describes, “you sit in silence for a period of time and cultivate feelings of tenderness, warmth, and compassion for another person by repeating a series of phrases to yourself wishing them love, peace, strength, and general well-being.”

“Fredrickson likes to call love a nutrient,” Smith writes.  “If you are getting enough of the nutrient, then the health benefits of love can dramatically alter your biochemistry in ways that perpetuate more micro-moments of love in your life, and which ultimately contribute to your health, well-being, and longevity.”

So remember, fellow readers, as you go meandering from one blog site to another like busy little bees, making those “micro-moment” connections with people whose work you admire, that you are engaged in a kind of virtual love-making.  You are distributing a pollen-like “nutrient” that nurtures others, as well as yourself.

As Louis says, “what a wonderful world” we live in!

This essay was first posted in a slightly altered version in 2013.

“To Be Replaced by Love” – George Saunders’ Wish for Graduates

Tags

Advice, George Saunders, Graduation Speech, Hayden Carruth, inspiration, Love, poetry

With graduation season upon us, I thought I’d re-share the most inspiring graduation speech I ever read. One by the acclaimed writer George Saunders that went viral five years ago. Below is a slightly altered version of my original as well as the poem by Hayden Carruth that inspired his speech.

It’s not often you get major writers speaking of such mundane and seemingly trite things as “regrets” and “kindness” to students graduating from ivy-league schools. But that’s what Saunders spoke about at Syracuse University five years ago..

You can read the whole speech HERE.

Saunders starts out with this amazing statement:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Then he lists sensible ways to learn how to be kind:

Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition – recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.

Because kindness, it turns out, is hard – it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include…well, everything.

But not to worry, he says, because kindness, hard as it is, becomes easier as we grow older. As life kicks us around a bit we learn to become more kind, because we realize how much we need it, and depend upon it, and want it for our loved ones.

Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE.

Wow. To be replaced by love. I can’t think of a more worthwhile goal to strive toward for anyone starting off in life. Or winding down, for that matter.

Here is Carruth’s poem.

Testament

by Hayden Carruth

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away — I’m sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I’ve made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can’t go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow’s mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I’m no financier doing
the world’s great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below

“Truth & Love Wins” Redux

Tags

good government, Love, personal, Politics, special interests., the common good, truth

Sunrise with Sea Monsters by JMW Turner

I am happy to report that at least in one very narrow slice of life, truth and love has indeed won. If you read my original post, the whole thing started with me ruminating about a nasty custody battle, and my fervent hope that “truth and love” would win in the end. It did. The judge was not persuaded by all the lies (easily proven) that were slung against my son, and the eventually ruling favored him, while benefiting the mother as well. A win-win, as I see it, and hope that she does too.

On the political front, I’m still hopeful that “truth and love” will win in the end, and there is evidence that this is bearing true.

But the problem with “winning” is that it splits us all into two camps: the winners and the losers. And when that happens, no one really wins, at least for long. The pendulum will keep swinging back and forth between the two camps.

In reality, truth and loves “wins” only when there are no losers and winners, when there is only the common good. As a nation we seemed to have moved far away from that once common goal. In fact, the whole notion of a “common good” seems to be in ill repute.

In the struggle between rugged individualism and the common good, a struggle which gave rise to our nation, rugged individualism seems to be winning out. “Rugged individualism” even sounds way cooler than the tepid “common good.” Who wants to be “common,” after all?  Or “good”?

During an earlier age of Enlightenment and Reformation, “the common good” was a revolutionary idea:

Saint Thomas Aquinas held “the common good” (bonum commune, in Latin) to be the end of law and government; John Locke declared that “the peace, safety, and public good of the people” are the ends of political society, and further argued that “the well being of the people shall be the supreme law”; David Hume contended that “social conventions” are adopted and given moral support in virtue of the fact that they serve the “public” or “common” interest; James Madison wrote of the “public,” “common,” or “general” good as closely tied with justice and declared that justice is the end of government and civil society; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood “the common good” (le bien commun, in French) to be the object of a society’s general will and the highest end pursued by government.

The “common good” and ‘”good government” were one in the same:

Though these thinkers differed significantly in their views of what the common good consists in, as well as over what the state should do to promote it, they nonetheless agreed that the common good is the end of government, that it is a good of all the citizens, and that no government should become the “perverted servant of special interests,”[10] whether these special interests be understood as Aristotle’s “interest of the rulers,” Locke’s “private good,” Hume’s and Madison’s “interested factions,” or Rousseau’s “particular wills.” Wikipedia  

But we live in troubled times and good ideas cycle in and out of favor. Self interest and serving special interests seem to be winning the day. And so there will be no peace.

Jane Addams, the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1831 wisely cautioned: “The  good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

I’m hoping for the sake of peace in my family, and our nation, that a “common good” will be secured for all of us.

“Truth and Love Wins”

Tags

hate, healing, inspiration, justice, Love, personal, Politics, Spiritual transformation, spiritual warfare, truth, world affairs

J.M.W. Turner – Angel Standing in a Storm

This has become my mantra in recent months: ‘Truth and Love wins.”

It’s what gets me through the day when I would despair against the chaotic events unfolding in our national and world affairs. And on the home front as well, as my son faces a vicious custody battle. It’s what boosts my spirits and keeps me on a steady course moving forward.

I’m a firm believer in that “the truth will out,” that lies will eventually be exposed and turn against the liar. That “the truth will set you free,” freeing not only the one lied about, but the one who lies as well.

I also firmly believe that “love trumps hate,” that it outlasts hate and will win the day in the end.

I’ve been heartened to see on the front pages of our news outlets how the truth about those who have committed crimes, whether through political intrigue or money laundering or sexual assault, has come out into the open. Only when lies and secret crimes have been uncovered will justice and healing begin.

It bears out Martin Luther King’s claim that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” Truth wins. Love wins. In the end.

But in the middle of the fray, all is gray and murky.

When we are in the midst of the battle, feeling attacked, maligned, unjustly persecuted; when our safety and future are threatened; when fear and anger, the desire to retaliate, to hate back, to feel a gleeful satisfaction at another’s downfall, when all this takes over our thoughts, we soon realize that we’re caught up in the same tangled web we’ve sworn to fight against.

That’s how lies and hate work, how they turn would-be champions of love into haters themselves. A hater of the haters.

Allowing these feelings go unchallenged perpetuates the very thing we would fight against. It divides the world into us and them, and no matter which side we stand on in that battle, we are all losers.

We have to watch our thoughts and guard our hearts so carefully, if we would not be pulled inside out and find that we are fighting on the side of hate ourselves, against those we feel have done us wrong or hurt our loved ones.

We all know this. But it’s hard not to hate the haters. What could we possibly find to love in them?

I found something that helps me with this. I was told: “You don’t have to love them. You just have to love. You watch your thought and guard your heart so only love enters.

In that frame of mind, feeling compassion for the hater comes naturally. How could we not feel compassion for someone who seems so helpless to fight against a hatred that hurts them far more than the one it’s directed against?

In that frame of mind, I can turn that gleeful sense of self-righteousness into simply gratitude for good. Gratitude for the fact that the lie is exposed, the crime revealed, justice is done, and now reformation and healing can take place.

What I’m learning is that none of us are spared of the temptation to hate, to be greedy or deceitful or dishonest for what we see as a “righteous cause.”

What I’m learning is that the warfare with “evil” as we see it is not really fought on the outside with the other. It’s all on the inside, with ourselves, our own thoughts, our own hearts. That’s where the battle against hate and deceit is fought and won.

These lessons are not new. They are as old as time The wise among us have been telling us forever to “love our enemies,” to “turn the other cheek,” to “be the change we want to see in the world.”

It sounds simplistic and idealistic until we actually try to do it. Then we discover it’s the most difficult war we will ever have to wage, right in our own hearts.

And we also discover what Martin Luther King meant when he said:

“I have decided to stick to love. . . Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

 

In the Mood for Love, in Music and Art

Tags

art, Love, Lovers, music, Pinterest, Romance, Visual Arts

Emil Nolde – Lover’s Embracing

Some favorite pairings in music and art to start your weekend off. I fell in love with this hauntingly sad-sweet piece by Shigeru Umebayashi and paired it with some of my favorite romantic images on my “Mothers and Other Lovers” Pinterest page. Enjoy.

 

Antonio Canova – Psyche Revived by Cupid’s kiss

 

Edvard Munch “Kiss by the Window”

 

A Knight’s Kiss b Anne Anderson

Auguste Rodin

Tristan and Isolde by Mac Fisman

Lovers by William Powell Firth

 

 

By Erhard Loblein

 

Meeting on the Turret Stairs by Frederick Burton

 

Marc Chagall

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

 

The Fisherman and the Siren by Frederic Leighton

 

Adam and Eve from Milton’s Paradise Lost

 

Gustaf Tenggren illustration for Grimm’s Fairy Tale

 

 

By Emil Nolde

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Love, Power, and Economic Justice

Tags

class, Donald Trump, Economic Justice, equality, inspiration, Love, Martin Luther King, Politics, power

Celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King days before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th President of the Unites States could not seem more incongruous, nor be more timely. And needed.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he had begun to turn his attention away from the civil rights movement to what he considered to be an even more compelling problem: economic injustice.

“For we know now that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”

He had discovered that the major divisive force in America was not color, but class. The rich and powerful, whether black or white, shared the same interest in keeping the races segregated, exploiting the poor and powerless, and maintaining the status quo.

He believed the unequal distribution of wealth was tearing America apart and threatening to make it a two-class society.  He wanted to help build the kind of America that would not tolerate poverty within its borders, that would not allow one class to exploit another, that would not allow the powerful to abuse the powerless.

He called for “a revolution in values” that placed “democratic principles and justice above privilege.” Fighting for this change would not be easy. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting,” he warned. “The battering rams of justice” are needed.

Shortly before his death he began organizing for another march on Washington, this time for economic equality. He fought for an “economic bill of rights” that guaranteed full employment and a livable wage, affordable housing and a “massive public works programs (to build) decent housing, schools, hospitals, mass transit, parks and recreation centers.”

“Freed from the smothering prison of poverty, people could chart their own path and fully realize their human potential.”

At King’s death, nearly 50 years ago, the minimum wage in today’s dollars would be $9.54. Now it is only $7.25. That’s a loss of nearly three dollars per hour for today’s workers.

The gap between the rich and the poor is far greater now than it was then. The two-class society King feared and warned us against is already here. And people in the mostly white rust belt who had been suffering steep economic decline because of jobs being shipped overseas, decided they had had enough. Decided that career politicians had failed them. Decided that what they needed was a “strong man” to save them.

Why do the hard work of organizing, of mobilizing workers to strike and march, of flooding into the offices of their congress to demand change, of creating white papers on policy-change and registering voters? Why do that when they had a demagogue who promised, “I will fix it, I will bring jobs back, I alone will do this.”

They trusted him to do hard work for them. A man who said the minimum wage was already too high. Who did not support tuition-free colleges. Who’s idea of stirring the economy was to give even more tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent. And whose “jobs bill” appears to be giving even more subsidies (corporate welfare) to big business to “fix” our broken infrastructure. It’s just another form of “trickle-down,” voodoo economics.

The few jobs Trump has saved so far by giving kickbacks to corporations to keep their factories in the US is a small pittance in comparison to the number of jobs President Obama saved in his stimulus packet and in the auto industry bail-out at the beginning of his term.

But so far these Trump supporters seem pleased. And well they should. What they want is THEIR jobs back. And they believe that Trump will keep trying to do that.

Unfortunately, Trump isn’t interested in economic equality across the board. He isn’t interested in tearing apart the political policies and economic structures that create and sustain a two-class society, that allows the rich to grow richer and the poor poorer as one class exploits another. Economic justice isn’t on his radar or even part of his vocabulary.

And for many Trump supporters that’s just fine.

But the rest of us, hopefully we are waking up. A divided America cannot stand. Economic just across the board is sorely needed, in all corners of our nation. In the rural outback and inner cities, the factories and fast food kitchens. It’s needed for home care workers and preschool teachers, for farm workers and grocery clerks, for all who work full-time jobs for half-time wages, for all who see good jobs disappear without the training programs to support those who lose them.

What we need, as King said, is “a revolution in values” that places “democratic principles and justice above privilege.”

We need an economic system based on love. That’s what transforms the heart and mind and motivates real lasting change.

King said: “Power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anemic.  Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against justice . . . It is the collusion of immoral power with powerless immorality that constitutes the major crisis of our times.”

That kind of love and economic equality lifts all boats, for, as King said, we are all “interrelated.”

“The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich. The betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one affects all indirectly.”

This is Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy to us, and his challenge: To end poverty and economic injustice by wedding power with love.

He writes:

“In the final analysis, love is not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual.

When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems.

Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”

In the age of Trump, this kind of love is needed more than ever.

 

 

To Mother the World

Tags

children, Family, Love, Mother, mothering, Mothers Day, spirituality, Tao, Tao Te Ching

The novel I am working on is about relationships between mothers and children and all the ways that is expressed, from the most fearful and destructive to the most trusting and freeing. So I’ve been thinking a lot on this topic lately.

A passage that had a huge influence on my understanding of what “mothering” is, or could be, is found in the Tao Te Ching (CHXXV):

There was something complete and nebulous

Which existed before the Heaven and Earth,

Silent, invisible

Unchanging, standing as One,

Unceasing, ever-revolving,

Able to be the Mother of the World.

This Mother of the World, of course, is Tao, the all-pervading, all embracing, unchanging, and unceasing. It’s the thing that evolves, supports, nurtures, protects, and provides space for its “children,” all individual being.

A tall order for a mere human.

Yet something about that passage spoke to me as a woman and mother. It drew within me the desire to embrace my children in that spirit. And I found the mothering of my own two children improved immensely when I was able to step back and project in some way this more expansive sense of mothering that allows them to feel loved and supported without all the worries and anxieties and criticism and fear that accompany a mere human sense of mothering.

This mothering is not as personal, intense, or myopic, as the latter. It doesn’t hover, it doesn’t obsess, it doesn’t fret. It frees them “to be,” and is based on an immense sense of trust—in myself, in them, and in the universe at large. In God, or Tao, or some divine presence or higher power that embraces all of us, and gives each of us the capacity to mother each other.

This is not to say that I often meet this ideal. Far from it.

But I know that I mother my own children best and make fewer mistakes when I’m able to embrace them in that larger, more expansive way. And it feels more natural, less constricted, to mother that way.

I find this kind of mothering works best when all-inclusive. When I embrace all around me with the same mothering spirit. Not just my children, but all children, all people, all things—my home, my community, my work—even the individual objects that fill the space around me and the space outside my window.  When I’m able to actually feel and identify with that potential, to “be” the “Mother of the World.”

Mothering, I learned, is a capacity that anyone can embrace: man, woman, child. You don’t have to be a mother, or have children of your own, to mother the world. When you adopt that stance, all things become your children to nurture, cherish, support, love—to help bring to their full potential.

Here’s wishing you all a lovely day of “mothering.”

Sexy, Smart, Sweet, & Soulful

Tags

books, Diana Galbaldon, Erotica, Love, Romance, sexy, soulful, The Outlander, TV, TV series

Finally! I found what I was looking for when I wrote the post Speaking of Erotica, a “steamy love story that has depth and substance.” I wrote:

I am seeking something that stimulates and satisfies in a deeper way than what I’ve found so far. A story that explores, perhaps, at least to some degree, both the sensual and spiritual nature of desire, arousal, and consummation. After all, sexual and spiritual pleasure, power and transformation are parallel journeys on the road to fulfillment. Both are precipitated by strong human desires for union with the Other. Both, arguably, are what shape us as human beings.

Each journey involves deep longing for something beyond the individual self. Each requires trust and receptivity, surrender and self-sacrifice, tenderness and devotion. Each gives way to passion and delight, awe and wonder, ecstasy and bliss, love and transcendence.

Each seeks the Beloved.

Strangely enough, I read the first three chapters of the book in question and put it away, thinking it wasn’t what I was looking for. And I might never have returned to the book if it hadn’t recently been made into a cable TV series that I watched on Netflix. The film took me beyond the pages I had read and showed me what I had missed. Now I’ve finished the first book in the cult-classic series and have begun the second.

Yes, you guessed it. The book is The Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, a time-traveling historical romance set in the 1940’s and 18th century Scotland.

The book isn’t as literary as I’d originally hoped and the prose sometimes dips toward purple, but it makes up for it by some truly beautiful writing and by turning the romance genre upside-down in so many interesting (and sometimes disturbing) ways. Our hearty hero, for instance, is younger than our heroine and he’s a virgin to boot. It is he who is lusted after by the villain rather than our heroine. And she, far from being an innocent is an experienced, strong, deeply intelligent woman with a fierce mind of her own, which, sadly, gets her and a lot of other people into a lot of trouble. Yet, while she puts herself into situations where she must be saved, she does an equal amount of saving herself.

Still, the characters are nuanced and complex, including the villains, and the plot turns in unexpected ways that add the depth and substance I was seeking. And the romance that blooms between Claire and Jaime is not only steamy but sweet and tender and, yes, soulful, in the way that Whitman writes with such lust and love for life in all its many intimate and erotic forms.

The Outlander series has been around for a long time and has a large, devoted following. I’m surprised I hadn’t come across it before.

How about you? Have you read the books or are you watching the Starz series? If you’ve read or watched Game of Thrones, chances are you will enjoy these as well.

Here’s a fun and sexy music video that will get you into the mood for romance.

Happy Valentines Day – Celebrating Lasting Love

Tags

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Kahlil Gibran, Love, Madeleine L 'Engle, Marriage, poetry, Valentines Day

“The Turning of the Tide” by Charles Dana Gibson

I’m reprinting a post I wrote two years ago, the first to be Freshly Pressed. Hope you enjoy it.

They say opposites attract. That was true when my husband and I first met. I found in him everything I felt missing in myself—he was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident, practical, capable, a man of the world. I was shy, timid, uncertain of myself, a romantic, an idealist, inexperienced. I was a senior in High School. He was a marine returning home from two years in Viet Nam. I thought I had found my soul mate, we seemed to complement each other so well, like two halves of a whole, yin and yang.

The truth is, we were just what we needed at the time. This dark, moody often angry young man who could also be so sweet and loving fulfilled a romantic yearning in me to sooth the savaged soul—Beauty and the Beast, after all, had always been my favorite fairy tale. And he was sorely needing the sweetness and innocence he saw in me, after the things he had witnessed in war. We fit together perfectly in each other’s arms. We still do.

But now I no longer believe in soul mates. I discovered that all the things I was attracted to in him, that seemed to be missing pieces of me, were really undeveloped parts of myself, and a sense of “completion” could not come from outside me but from within. Once I realized that and began to discover that I too was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident and capable, I no longer yearned for a soul mate. I could stand upright and free even while fully committed to our marriage. We did not need each other, but we chose to be together. We were committed to creating a life that we both could love and enjoy together.

I had always loved what Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet had written about marriage, and came to see the wisdom of his words:

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I also came to realize what Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Gift From The Sea” wrote:

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

And finally, I whole-heartedly embraced what Madeleine L’Engle in “The Irrational Season” wrote:

“To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take . . . . If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation… It takes a lifetime to learn another person… When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.”

My husband and I celebrated our 43rd anniversary last week. Here’s what I’ve learned about lasting love:

That marriage is a journey, not a destination, and the way will be hard, and filled with obstacles and challenges and heartache. That real love is not “true love.” It’s not a given. It doesn’t come ready-made. You have to fight for it, you have to work for it, you have to shake it out from time to time, and mend it and keep adding stitch after stitch, row after row, if you want to make it big enough and strong enough to last a lifetime.

Our marriage quilt is a tattered thing, but beautiful in its homeliness, in the places where its obvious rips and tears have been mended over and over again, the places where it’s grown thin and threadbare and had to be reinforced, as well as the places where it’s warm and soft and scented with memories that bring deep pleasure.

Loveliest of all are the stitches we are still sowing day by day, moment by moment, hand in hand, together.

I will end this series of posts on love and marriage with the last love poem I wrote my husband, a few years after our marriage had almost ended.

It is a simple, playful poem, meant to please a man who is not a lover of poetry, but loves the woman who writes it.

To Dale, On Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary

Sometimes you ask me if I really love you,
Like the answers hid behind a lock and key
You are my love and all the world must know it
For it’s scattered ‘cross the land and half the sea.

There are winds and waves much sweetened by our pleasure,
Rocks and sand well smoothed by hips and thighs,
Grass that grows much greener from our nearness,
And trees that rustle still with sated sighs.

If you climb a certain stream that flows near Big Sur
You’ll find a rock well made for lying on,
It knew our love before it was made sacred
And longs to feel our lover’s urge again.

While high along the rugged spine of Baja,
Where boney cliffs fall far to find the sea,
We saw the world stripped bare of all but beauty
And we alone like Adam and his Eve.

The moon once tipped the hills beyond Coyote
And laced Conception Bay with fluorescent light,
We swam out naked through those silken waters
Where you would me round your hips and held me tight.

And cupped within the palm of Virgin Gorda
Lies an island and a secret, sandy cove,
Where we waded from the sea like mating mermen
And stretched upon the sand to prove our love.

The wind once made an early morning visit
As we rolled upon a hook in Carib Bight,
While sweeping down the hatch it caught us naked
And added its cool breath to our delight.

Now wind and sea and rock and tree can tell you
The answer that you say you do not know,
You are my love and all the world’s a witness
For its sung wherever winds and waves do blow.

NOTE:  This ends a series of posts that originally were supposed to be part of a series of love poems to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are the first four posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. 

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed