love and the soil of the heart

maybe the girly mags and popular wisdom have got it all wrong. maybe the woman who wrote a book on how to hook a man and get married (!) has got it all wrong.

that you don't set yourself up to find love - you go out to singles parties and clubs and wherever else, meet guys, chat them up and date them and make lists of what you want in a man.

maybe the answer is getting the soil of the heart ready for love which demands commitment, unselfishness, trust and faith. and it's an internal process which begins with knowing, trusting and loving yourself first. and building up yourself to be a functioning, whole and integrated individual ready to make space for another person in your life on a deeper level.

i'm still finding out.

friendship counts for something ... doesn't it?

No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her, but many a woman hates a man for being a friend to her.
-Alexander Pope-

such a fitting saying ... to hear 'but i see you as a friend only' means rejection of the offer to be something more than friends. it hurts so much, no less than it did in Pope's day and age.

'why can't you love me that way?'

i think romantic love can't be forced. compelled. it's manipulation and trickery if it is. but at the same time, putting aside chemistry and that inexplicable x factor moments... love is an act of tenderness and reaching out.

and i believe that friendship does count for something, doesn't it?
friendship means encouragement, love, acceptance and support. friendship means being there for the other person. friendship means truth and honesty and the closing of barriers.
friendship means all of this and more.

it's lovely to have a true friend. so the next time you think that the guy has rejected you ,think about whether he was a friend to begin with. there's a value to having a true friend that cannot simply be dismissed out of hand.

because the truth hurts the least

some time has passed since.

first there were the recriminations and the anger.

then the sadness. but knowing that it is futile makes it a bit easier. keeping the hopes focused on a distant star, on a person faraway - it's an illusion that takes one away further and further from reality and what is. not what can be.

recognising that the weaknesses in one are almost the same weaknesses in the other - where is the support and where is the synergy? bleeding hearts, broken and wounded. if you wanted a God or a Goddess, you would never have gotten it - human relationships are not meant to be as such.
some people can live with putting their idols on a pedestal, but how long can adulation last?

waiting for someone to complete you, waiting for someone to heal the wounds...
well, it doesn't happen. there is a wait, but it's not for someone to do all that for you.
it's seeing and knowing that in the grand scheme of things, the synergy and strength from a partnership based on mutual respect, trust, growth and love will come when the time is right. you work at creating these, it's true, but only God makes it possible to begin. the seed and spark of a beautiful bloom did not come from you. it was given, a gift.

so even when you are planting and nurturing, give thanks that it was given in the first place.

instead of living a lie(s), take the truth as it is - because the truth hurts the least.

is it possible to love selflessly?

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

i don't pretend i know a lot about love, i am ignorant.
but surely this i know, instinctively, soul deep - i am not intellectual enough to give a long and detailed reasoning for this - that it IS possible to love selflessly.

if we but begin by recognising that all human loves are a reflection for man's love of Divinity, of God, then it becomes possible to love selflessly. man's nature is fallen and fragmented, broken and he loves imperfectly, yet even in that broken image, there is the beginnings of a selfless love, a love that desires the best for the other and to develop and build up the other.

i know this though, i won't reject love again - if it comes knocking.

because He reaches out to me through the simple acts of love in my life, and has been doing so all this while.

[i was inspired to write this after thinking about this for the longest time yet. i'm still refining my understanding, though, and hope to share with all of you my thoughts on this matter again later]

rewrite. wait for the last star

everyone's got to write their own love story - how it all began, how it all started. what and when you fell in love. and sometimes you just gotta rewrite it. especially when it didn't start out right.

you take out a pen, hoping to cross out the parts that hurt the most, but nothing's happening. the marks are there, the tear-streaks, the broken pieces of a heart that still beats. you ask yourself - why bother? but something tells you that it's worth the trouble. just one more time. you don't know why, you don't know how. but you know it is.

so you try again, this time you know that the chapter is closed. done. over with. nothing more left to add, but the story goes on. because the rewrite is working out after all, you can start a new chapter to the story.

in the midst of all that, you wonder, staring out into the night - you missed the first star, the one people wish on for happiness and for their dreams to come true. now you wait for the last star. people don't wish on the last star fading into the darkness. but you hope in the rays of the morning sun, you keep on waiting for the last star.

Restlessness on a Friday night

Restlessness on a Friday Night

2007-09-23

Driving me to the airport this summer, my youngest brother told me a story: One Friday afternoon, he and some co-workers were talking about what they would be doing that evening, the beginning of the weekend. Several co-workers shared how they had plans to meet various friends and hit some of the more trendy night-spots in the city. My brother, happily married for twenty years, rather timidly shared that he and his wife planned simply to order in some pizza and watch movie together.

"That must sound rather boring to you!" He volunteered. "Not at all," said one of the single women in his office. "We are doing all the things we do (restaurants, nightclubs, and a certain social scene) only that sometime, and God-willing, sooner rather than later, we can be where you are now, content to be at home of a Friday night, with pizza and a movie and someone to make a home with!"

Perhaps that isn't true for everyone but it is, I venture to say, true for most of us. What we want at the end of the day, not to mention the end of the week, is home, ease, quiet, rest, someone to be comfortable with, some place to be comfortable in, a home. We want a place where we can be ourselves and where we don't have to feel the restlessness of thinking that our lives are empty because we are home on a Friday night.

That's not always easy to find. Fault nature and God: We are born into a home and we get to stay there, without having to hit night-spots on a Friday night, until puberty. Puberty is designed by nature and God to drive us out of our homes. And it does. It hits with certain violence and, even though we get to live at home for another 5-8 years, we are no longer at ease there. Every kind of energy inflames and we become too restless to find easy ease in the things that once satisfied us. We are pushed out, beyond the security and comfort of home, to search for someone and something with which to build a home for ourselves.

And so we enter our more restless years, those years exactly where we can't sit at home comfortably on a Friday night with pizza and movie. We're driven out, literally, to search for what can take us back home. So we hit the phone and the night-spots, searching, available, seeing, being seen. For some people, the point behind it all is clear: We are searching for a soul-mate, like the heart-sick lover in the Song of Songs and my brother's co-worker. For others, it's more diffusive, inchoate: We're just restless, looking for action, for the right place to be, the right crowd to be with.

Initially there is no sense of desperation, we are young and the years still stretch endlessly ahead. But eventually a certain panic and desperation set in.. Restlessness can be punishing, a merciless bully, robbing us of the simple capacity to rest.

And we feel it most cruelly on weekends, Friday nights, when it seems everyone in the whole world is doing something exciting except us, and then around holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays) when the season itself seems to demand that we not be alone.

Some years ago, teaching a class at a state-run University, I assigned as reading material Christopher de Vinck's book, Only the Heart Knows How to Find Them: Precious Memories for a Faithless Time. The book is a series of wonderful, quite idealistic, essays on marriage and family life. The essays articulate precisely the richness of being comfortably at home with a spouse and family on any night, perhaps especially on a Friday night. A young woman, about thirty years of age, walked my office one day with de Vinck's book in hand and tears in her eyes. She told me: "Father, I've lived a hot-blooded youth and have slept my way through a couple of states, always thinking that's where life is. But, what I really want is what this man has! A home, a spouse, a place of that kind of comfort!"

A place of comfort! God-willing, may we all eventually find exactly that. Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones who have already found it, in a soul-mate who has taken you home. But it can also be found in vocation, in a service, in a faith, in an ideal, in friends, inside of ourselves in a deeper confidence that lets us feel complete and worthwhile even when we are home alone on a Friday night, and especially in a God, who is our ultimate soul-mate and with whom, with or without trendy night-spots or pizza and a movie, we are always at home.

Henri Nouwen used to say: "We are not restful persons who occasionally get restless; but rather restless persons who occasionally find rest." That's true for all of us, this side of eternity, perhaps especially on a Friday night.

taken from Fr Ron Rolheiser's column. it puts into words what i have always known, and felt.
God bless each and every one of you, and may any loneliness you know be banished by the knowledge that there is a home within all of us.

backstage - part i

ladders, and boxes, and blocks of wood,
ropes and pulleys. the stagehands sit at the back, waiting for their cue.
a few huddle around, sharing a cigarette break, oblivious to the peremptory sign.
and the stage manager, his piercing glare takes them in, deepening into a scowl when he sees the cloud of smoke.

and one of the stagehands begins to think:
who gives a f***, anyway? looking at those buggers prance around on stage. not like they know how hard it is to heave these damned props around. Look! night turns into day! it's stormy weather! wow! and what do they do? ooh and aah over them in the stupid makeup and idiot clothes.

a flurry of activity, fading into almost a blur. it's almost time for the curtains to come up...hurry! hurry. push and pull. the levers. the cloth. the actors taking their positions. the prompt reader looks a bit apologetic, and she gives a nervous smile.
and the stagehands, it's time for them to come out.

again, and again. why do i do this? stubbed out a cigarette. the ropes come up.

wait a minute. isn't Harry supposed to be the one to set this up? damn that bastard! he's off flirting with that chorus girl. stupid f***ers!

and then it's lights, camera, action! another day in the wonderful, exciting life of Joseph Brown, stagehand extraordinaire...

alright i m done. i let go of the rope. and then i look up, to see a new face sitting in the chorus. there's something about this face. she's not pretty. i've seen better looking dogs. but there's something about her face, and her smile. she's nervous, but she's hiding it well.
and that voice...i've never heard anything like it. i think i m starting to stare at her. what the hell?!!!

the feeling of everyday romance

somehow, it always comes down to candlelight dinners, and a night out, chocolate and flowers and soft toys. but is that all there is to romance?

the feeling of everyday romance - a letter, maybe it's not so long, but the affection, the desire to keep in touch, to share is ever present in those simple words...i have always loved both writing and receiving letters, and some of my sweetest memories are contained in letters. or emails, their modern incarnation.

and of conversations, good long ones that make you wonder where the time went, and how you wish you could spend more time with each other. the warmth of knowing you're accepted for who you are, and it's safe to show the other person your wounds, share your dreams and brokenness and little things that mark you as being you. conversations that are warm, and sparkle with wit and a sprinkling (or more!) of humour.

those small little kindnesses, the ones you almost forget about, oh, how they add up when you look back.

but most importantly, the feeling of adventure, that life has many bends in its path, and you long to explore them together with the one you love best. with it, you begin to see that romance is in the mundane as well. that it's in the everyday moments, even as they pass.

a vixen love poem (ii)

blue. always blue.
and she wears it to please him.
to make him happy.
because his joy is hers...
and he is hers,

and so when she tells him
that the red shirt he wears
brings out the light in his eyes,
she waits
for him to wear it to please her,
because her joy is his,
and she is his.