"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." 1 Cor 13:4-7
In all that I know, and based on my tiny life experience, I'd say love sounds a lot like letting go. Letting go of ego. Letting go of control. Being honest. It reminds me of the Jesus kitchen at the rainbow gathering. It reminds me of the double rainbow you showed us. It reminds me of Stripe and Yellow. They were together and let go so one another could fully become themselves. Love preservers but it also preserves. It reminds me of the ballad of love and hate. It preserves itself and in doing so, in creating that great self respect, it also preserves the wholeness in all else. Love is self-reliant in the most generous way.
I want to be bound to somebody, but I want to be fully me forever. All that I love is all that I have to give. Love is giving myself. Love is laying down my life for my friends. Love always hopes. I don't need to understand.
I need to be.
I love Adam.
I do.
That's from the letter she wrote me Tuesday. Communication is such a strange thing.
Being understood
Being known
I know Bea loves me, she tells me all the time.
How we both toss that heavy word back and forth as if we are playing a game.
I love you
I love you more
I wonder sometimes
What are we talking about when we talk about love
She wrote a small taste of what love is to her in that letter.
It helps me understand to know her message when she communicates that significant word.
To love is to let go. To let that person be truly who they are. But also to let go of yourself and trust the other person. Love is to to be bound to somebody and to be fully you forever. The two mixed strangely together.
I think I like that
I'm not ready.
I love Adam.
I do.
But I don't want to lose me.
I like Bea's fear of marriage, it shows the gravity of the action to her. Marriage isn't just something you do with someone randomly.
To marry is to love and to love is to let go in the complete and purest meaning of the word. God knows I've learned that as time and time again I am forced to let go, to wait, and to hope that I will spend my short days on this Earth with Bea, the woman I love.
It makes the chance of hearing her yes all the more meaningful. She mentioned her yes being yes.She wants to take time to strengthen that yes. I do trust her yes. When she commits to me I know she is fully committed because she is aware of the meaning of love and she is aware of the gravity of the action. Last year before I let fear drive me from her she was committed it was good.
I missed her today, I wonder if she missed me.
She loves me
and that's real
I hope she comes home.
She will be with me again in about 19 hours. No place I'd rather be then beside her.
My best friend
My family
To be so known and loved by another human
what a rare and wonderful gift You offer us God.
A small taste of what's after.
People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.
Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .
When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half hour – into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had; to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a common vision.
Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
-C.S. Lewis
I think that love is so much easier than you realize
If you can give yourself to someone, then you should
I'm yours and that's it, whatever.
I'm yours and that's it, forever.
Please once more, oh God.