Of course, it is impossible to write about love without sounding trite. There are so many kinds of love— erotic, platonic, filial, devotional, practical—stiff words that can’t come close to describing the heart’s movement towards another be it, partner, child, parent or pet or areas of experience such as music, poetry, painting, gardening, etc.
In a way we can’t help ourselves. Love happens to us and we find ourselves able to give of ourselves because something has been awakened inside—because the love object is somehow a quality inside us that we didn’t know we had and we see it reflected to us in the loved other. We want to join what is inside with what is outside. This can also disillusion us when what we saw was not really there. Love is never a mistake, however. We need to take chances with our hearts because we somehow have to be fully alive.
Phrases posted on Facebook, February 2015
February, at least in the Northeast, is often a dreary, cold month. No wonder we need Valentine’s Day in the middle of it — a day to remember love. My topic this month.
This month I want to share quotes from my book, Becoming Bread that uses the metaphor of bread making as a metaphor for lovemaking. We know the proverb that states that bread like love must be made everyday. Here’s the first quote:We are each given only so much time. And to make this time matter, in order to really live, we need to give, we need to receive. We need to love. Bread, life, and love are fused in the human experience.
The potential for a loving relationship with ourselves, with each other and with God is a gift. We cannot “make it”. But we can choose to be oriented toward the only place loving can occur, namely right here, now, where we are. Just the living of that orientation makes it more possible for this gift, this blessing, to happen to us and for us to receive it.
Perhaps only sages can truly speak about loving and how it transforms us. We are not sages. We are ordinary people. I hope this ordinariness will be a good enough credential to entitle any of us to speak from the heart. And to speak boldly even as we know that we do not really know. For here, together, we are becoming, becoming something that is not yet apparent.
To love we know we must meet each other “somewhere”. We know that place of meeting is none other than the here and now. There is no meeting anywhere else. We cannot live separately from what is.
Here is part of On The Threshold, about how much we need each other in order to experience love:
Hold my hand I need you for courage.
We become who we are together,
each needing the other. Alone is a myth.
Without the will to love, we cannot be consistent. “Love is a direction and not a state of the soul,” as Simone Weil says.
Here is a section from Hunger
Bowls and cups, pots and pans,
spoons — my hand, your hand.
We shall come to know ourselves
as vessels that can hold this moment
for each other, for the greater life
that seeks itself in us, trusts us
and hungers in us.
Here is a section from Seeing
I am afraid when you see
what I would not look at.
Your eyes are my witness.
If they look with love
I can bear to see what I have to offer—
The grain of my experience . . . my flour.
It is so bitterly cold I want to remember that summer exists.
Here is a section about summer and love.
The memory of Summer . . .
that it returns, that at the center
the open flower is sweet.
That at the center
when it opens, we too are sweet.
and love, like a swarm of bees,
can fly into us . . . ecstatic,
nectar-drunk and
powdered with pollen.
When those we love are in the fire and we can only watch, it is terrible. We feel helpless and afraid. When we are in the fire and no escape is possible, we tremble and shrink back. The passage through and into the heat of life is what we want . . . what we dread. “Who never ate his bread with tears, who never sat weeping on his bed during care-ridden nights knows you not, you heavenly powers,” said Goethe.
Behind all communion is the knowledge that we must give our lives to each other. And when we do, we can celebrate, we can mourn, we can trust, we can forgive, we can treasure, we can face our deaths.
Here is a piece from Crumbs
Take care of the crumbs:
a look, a laugh, a smile,
a teardrop, an open hand. Take care
of the crumbs. They are food also.
Do not let them fall.
Gather them. Cherish them.
