Enchanted Love

"In truth they do not see at all. That is why they call love blind, for it is they who cannot see. There are some things that cannot be seen with earthly eyes.

Enchanted love is one of them...

 If you hold my hand then I will hold my breath and cast my fate into the direction of my heart. I will put on hold my lesser dreams and reach for what is truly mine.

Say you will and I will buy my ticket for this ride. It will not be cheap, nor always smooth. But I don't care, I don't care. I have finally come to that...

Our deepest human need is not material at all: Our deepest human need is to be seen. We need adventure. We need meaning. We need identity. We need love. Someone who has seen us through loving eyes has awakened us from the rank of the formerly dead. Most people bear the stress of walking the world unseen, a mere number of cog in a lifeless machine. Mystical romance is a space of resurrection and repair. It does more than help us survive a soulless world; it helps us transform it."

 

Marianne Williamson

·  You can make mistakes in loving-which is why forgiveness is such a vital part of your loving actions toward your spouse. If you are forgiving, you are more likely to be forgiven.

·  Take your partner out to different places such as out for dinners, movies, or vacation.

·  Remember, service and love are inherently connected. Whatever you know your partners needs, that is what you should be doing to love him or her. The moment you start insisting on your way or doing what you want, you have stopped loving your spouse.

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On Relationships and Marriage

In the excitement of a new romance, it seems easy and natural to communicate your love for the other person. After marriage, however, many couples settle into a routine in which one or both partners feel as though they are taken for granted. Don't let another day go by without reinforcing your love for your spouse. Follow these steps to show your partner how much you really love them.

 

1. Remember, love is an act of the will, not a warm feeling or a clever expression of experience. True love requires you to deny yourself and seek to meet your beloved's needs.
2. Find out your partner's preferred "Love Language." Do they know you love them when you speak words of love? Or maybe they feel loved by your acts of service? Some people feel loved by receiving little gifts, and others by loving touches. Real love is not based on your preference but your partner's.
3. Speak your love. Clear communication will let your partner know how much you love them. Speaking from your experience is a way of sharing yourself so that your partner can hear it. You might say, "My heart expands when you walk into the room" or "I think about you throughout my day, and each time I do, I smile." Say whatever is true. Remember that actions often speak louder than words; don't just say something, do something.
4. Show your love through your actions, such as drawing a bath, giving a massage, doing the dishes, or writing a poem. Choose an action that you know your partner will appreciate. Remember, denying yourself never means doing things begrudgingly. If you communicate the desire not to do something loving, you may as well not be doing it.
5. Spend time being present with your partner. (This is often the least used, but the most powerful form of loving.) Turn off the phone, the TV, computer, and the radio and sit together allowing yourselves to experience each other. Being present with your husband or wife obviously provides the opportunity to serve him or her, so be available to love your spouse.
6. Speak the truth. Telling your partner the truth is a loving thing to do because it shows trust and respect. The truth doesn't have to be positive to be meaningful. It just needs to be true. Show your spouse unconditional love, but not unconditional acceptance. Don't be caught up into the cultural notion that to love is to never seek to help someone better himself or herself. Use gracious words to point out your spouse's weaknesses and offer constructive suggestions on how to improve these things. Always be willing to accept correction from your spouse too.

 

Bart Giamatti

"There is no great, long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself its own great, long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn't called fourth base. And then it came to me, ‘Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, ‘home.'' Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness that cling to the word ‘home' and are absent from ‘house' or even ‘my house.' Home is a concept, not a place; it's a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins, a mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original; perhaps like others, especially those one loves; but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate, and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen. All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it is about going home. It's about rejoining; rejoining a beloved, rejoining parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And ‘going home' is where that restoration occurs, because that's where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It's the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started. All the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – but not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here, back around to here."

Thus each person by his fears gives wings to rumor, and, without any real source of apprehension, men fear what they themselves have imagined. - Lucan

Happy New Year!

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others. - François de La Rochefoucauld