24 November 2009
06 November 2009
Love
Oh woman! (sounds bizarre eh? well being a true feminist here ;) why should it always be oh man! ) (I'm sure my hubby would be smiling reading along...), it's been quite long since I’ve been able to write a new entry. Ideas for a dozen new entries have been wriggling and impinging their way through the daily crowd of other thoughts vying for person hood in my mind, but until now they’ve been out-shouted by the mental workers in charge of the mundane details of life.
I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Gotta figure out what I think about a number of things. I’ll get those entries done hopefully in the next few days.
I’ve been hesitant to include quotes from others in this blog, even though I keep it all noted, I would rather strain to come up with my own brilliant arrangements of words. Kind of like a musician feels about playing cover songs versus their own music.
However, maybe that’s just arrogance.
So, in light of our recently passed first anniversary,(couple a months may i say!) here are some quotes (from the net of-course)
~Marriage- before it is anything else, an act of contemplation. It is a divine pondering, an exercise in amazement…for marriage, as simply as it can be defined, is the contemplation of the love of God in and through the form of another human being.”
~Two people who have dreamed for years about getting married and who think of themselves as hating to be alone, marriage still cannot help but come as an invasion of privacy. No one has ever married without being surprised, and usually alarmed, at the sheer intensity of this invasion.”
~Marriage- is an enormous source of human frustration that our need for intimacy far outstrips its capacity to be met in other people.
~The fact is that our natural tendency is to treat people as if they were not ‘others’ at all, but merely aspects of ourselves. We do not experience them as the overwhelming, comprehensive realities which we feel ourselves to be. Compared with us, they are not quite real. We see them as if through a haze, the haze of our own all-engulfing self-hood…
~"For truly to open our hearts to another person is to invite them into our own throne room and to set them down on our very own throne, on the seat normally warmed by no one but ourselves. And to do that is to have the throne, the seat of the ego, rocked right off its foundations. Love is an earthquake that relocates the center of the universe.”
~" How tiring and intrusive other people can be! They heap us with expectations, demands, responsibilities, and any sense of significance in our own lives runs the risk of being swallowed up among the sheer numbers, the impossible teeming billions of others in the world….Is it any wonder we seek some refuge from this insignificance, from the crushing pressure of relationships, from the armies of other beings who would trek like locusts through the verdant pastures of our innermost souls? The need for such a refuge can only be met by the deliberate yet subliminal fantasy that we are all alone in the universe. And so we walk with our head in the clouds, pass people on the street as if they were telephone poles, look them straight in the eye and hardly see them, and engage in conversations that are really only conversations with ourselves. Too often others are but the punctuation marks in the dry and windy monologues of our own self-centered existence.
This willful but unconscious dilution of the full reality of other people is at heart a dilution of the reality of God — a watering down, that is, of reality Himself. For people are the consciousness of God in the world, the closest thing to Him in the physical realm, and a more vivid reminder than anything else in creation of His existence, His mystery, and His creative power. If man really is fashioned more than anything else, in the image of God, then clearly it follows that there is nothing on earth so near to God as a human being. The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity…is still to be closer to God than when looking up into the starry sky or at a beautiful sunset.”
~“ everyone on earth bears a secret resentment toward everyone else, simply for being alive. We resent one another for revealing so accurately and so openly and so painfully the depth of our lovelessness.”
~“When the illegitimate self, the one that is founded upon human pride and illusion, comes up against the real thing, it cannot stand. It has found what it has itself been struggling to be, and so crumbles with shame, relief, joy, realization.
Love attacks and destroys pride, therefore, simply by eliminating the need for it…what use is there in asserting the self if the self is already loved, fully and unreservedly, and not because of but in spite of anything it might do?”
~"The tongue is a pen, which pressing deeply enough (and whether for good or for evil) will write upon the heart.”
~“A marriage is not a joining of two worlds, but an abandoning of two worlds in order that one new one might be formed.”
~“We would like to think of ourselves, perhaps, as having a great impact on the world, touching and influencing thousands of lives. How great is our frustration when we realize that we do not adequately touch even the one single life of the person closest to us!”
~“You cannot leave a marriage sitting in the driveway even for a day, because the only reason for marriage is togetherness. It is an alliance of love, and love is a spiritual vehicle, a rocket ship, that travels faster and farther than anything else under the sun. Get out of it for a moment, and it leaves you for parts unknown; let it idle, and it begins to rust; neglect it, and it seizes right up. It can be a full-time job just being a passenger in this thing. But like it or not, you and your spouse are in it together, and in it for life, and the work of traveling in marriage is the most vital work you can do.”
~“…He has planned, through marriage, for the demands of love to be made so concrete, so immediate and particular, so focused and intense as to become inescapable. It is His way of turning love into a ‘do-or-die’ situation…in the taking of vows, it is as if they have agreed to an actual ultimatum: love or else. This is a curious and frustrating and often excruciatingly painful trap to be in, but the plain fact is that if a couple do not love one another first, as they do themselves, then they cannot really love themselves or anyone else. But when they do love, that love becomes a fire which has the power to en-kindle all around them.”
~“…contrary to the assumption of many, Scripture was not given to be obeyed; rather, it was given that the Lord might be obeyed.”
~“In marriage it so happens that the Lord has devised a particularly gentle (but no less disciplined and effective) means for helping men and women to humble themselves, to surrender their errant wills. Even the closest of couples will inevitably find themselves engaged in a struggle of wills, for marriage is a wild, audacious attempt at an almost impossible degree of cooperation between two powerful centers of self-assertion. Marriage cannot help being a furnace of conflict, a crucible in which these two wills must be melted down and purified and made to conform. Most people do not realize that this is what they are signing up for when they get married…It cannot succeed without, first of all, a profound acceptance of the conditions of struggle, the state of personal seige, in which it must be lived out, and secondly, without an ever-growing realization that one’s own self cannot and must not emerge as the winner of this struggle.”
~“From one point of view, the whole of life may be seen as a taking away, as one long and painful series of subtractions. We are forever being called upon to pull up stakes, to release our hold upon the things and places and people we have loved, and even upon each precious second as it slips through our aging fingers. Our very bodies are like tents, says Paul, the most temporary of houses, and our whole existence under the sun bears the marks of exile and nomad-ism.”
~“Just as the man who loves God will almost certainly incur greater suffering in this world than the man who does not, so it is that a man who loves a woman may…open himself up to deeper levels of suffering than a man who will not commit himself to any love at all. For it is not in the nature of love to deflect pain, but rather to absorb it, and to absorb greater and greater amounts of it.”
~“The person we love is inevitably a cross, as well as being a helper in the carrying of our own cross. Why must this be so? Simply because it is impossible to love anyone without seeing intimately into the tragedy of their lives, and everything that we see becomes a weight of grief in us. To love is not to view someone as being the most wonderful person in the world or to think of them as a saint. On the contrary, it may mean to see them as we must come to see ourselves, even as the ‘chief of sinners.’”
Vi Putnam~
~"The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person. "
Michael Leunig
~"Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that."
Anonymous
~"Love is not blind -- it simply enables one to see things others fail to see."
Whew.........
Hope
of false paths, broken lanes and desolate byways
Is there no hope?
Can we find no pharaoh in-
the gloom to point
us back toward
civilization?
But wait!
What's that
in the distance?
There amidst the dark-
and the sinister that surround us:
could it be the dim glow of a welcoming doorway?
It is! There is the prospect of warmth and solace here.
Who would have expected to find a citadel of light and cheer
surrounded by such an endless, boundless and depth-less sea of disorder...?
What Started Me Thinking?
I came across this phrases by some eminent personalities :1. "Whoever is happy will make others happy, too."by Mark Twain.
2.“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” by G. K. Chesterton
How often do people smile? is it soo hard to smile?
A smile from a stranger, smile from someone dear,someone from you love,someone who matters,someone you want to approach....
A smile really does brighten your day and is often the only thing you need to start a conversation with a stranger.
It is rare to smile at someone and not receive one in return :]
one never knows when that perfect stranger may be on their last leg, when someone just got some horrible news, a tragic diagnosis, or lost a loved one. Our smiles can be the beginning of something better for them...a reminder that there are people out there that care, who notice them.
Smiling is contagious...really, it is. I challenge you to do an experiment and see if when you smile at someone who doesn't and how they react.
Of course, there will be times when people do not respond....on those occasions, I usually make a comment like: "tough day, eh?" That usually gives way to a genuine response...in which case, I listen.
So, smile....it really does work wonders!
I, one day got two of the best compliments and that was because I made a conscious effort to smile while I was walking down the street. Someone cried out from across the road "nice smile". half an hour later I walked into a store and the man behind the counter said, "I love your smile." Needless to say I still remember those times and try to stay smiling. It changes your outlook and your mood, obviously it changes other people's also.
I was running errands the other day and while zooming off on my scooty, I usually detest, I realized I was thinking of something that was making me smile. I then realized that as I rode, I let more people in, got less uptight if I was cut off, the entire trip/chore was nicer. I vowed to remember that and to leave the house with a nice thought in my head and smile on my face. :-)
I love the term, *random smiling*!
Facial expressions don’t merely reflect emotions, they also affect emotions. In “facial feedback,” studies show, the mere act of smiling makes people happier—even when they smile mechanically, as I’m doing, or when they’re asked not to “smile” but rather to contract specific facial muscles.
Random smiling is an example of my resolution to “Act as I want to feel”: while people suppose that feelings inspire actions, in fact, actions also inspire feelings. So by acting happier, I should feel happier. And you know, I think I do. “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile.
Also, because of emotional contagion, people often mimic the faces of people they see. I’ve definitely noticed that people are much more likely to smile at me when I’m smiling.
The biggest challenge is to remember to do it. I’m reminded of my various efforts to improve my posture. I’m good for a little while, then get distracted and don’t think about it for the rest of the day.Smile and the world will smile with you, an old saying, but so true!!!