katerina, tuesday

Falling in love with them should make you fall in love with yourself too

If you aren't ready to be vulnerable, you aren't ready to be in love

to love someone is to give them peace

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.

“Married love knows better. Its movements are not outwards but inwards, and here it is soon aware that it has a wide world to itself, but also that every little constraint on its self has a quite other commensurability with the infinitude of love; and even if it feels pain because there is so much to fight against, so too it feels courage for this contest. Yes, it is daring enough to outdo you in paradoxes in practically taking pleasure in sin’s having entered the world; but it has the daring to outdo you in paradoxes in another sense too: it has the courage to resolve them. For marital love, like first love, knows all these obstacles are overcome in the infinite moment of love. But it also knows that the historical element in it is precisely the gaining of this victory, and that gaining it is not just a game but also a conflict, though also not just a conflict but also a game, as the conflict in Valhalla was a life-and-death struggle and yet still a game, since the contestants continually rose again rejuvenated from the dead. It also knows that this fencing is not an arbitrary duel but a conflict under divine patronage; and it feels no need to love more than one, yet feels a blessedness herein, and no need to love more than once, yet feels an eternity herein...”

• Kierkegaard, Either/Or

I wanted to make love possible philosophically, prove it was possible, render it possible. Only to discover it was never in any danger, you just can't have it while also being Orange Goo. You can't have both. You can’t be “one with the universe”, and have love. To have love you must be prepared to become Truly Alone, or, said another way: a whole, real person. And that was my blind spot - I couldn’t even conceive of this possibility, because the reason I wanted to save Love in the first place, was because I wanted to Merge with it, and be liberated from loneliness.

As a first principle, distrust euphoria.

There are worse things than suffering justly.

Pain is the sister of euphoria, not it’s opposite, and should not be trusted either. Suffering is equally disorienting. But shame is a shadow, it could not exist without a light source, and you can choose to either focus on the shadow, or use it to find the light.

Love without a subject, for the sole pleasure of loving, being the lover, is no love at all.

You’re not going into the relationship with a specific outcome—you’re always just hoping for more time, more time.

everything in the entire universe is always about love and when it isn't about love it is about the absence of love.

Dear friend,

I heard that you are once again in distress, perhaps by illness or worry—I am sorry for that, and so I write to you to give you strength.

You must remember that yours is a soul whom I esteem highly, for your courage and strength I know are second to none.

I often thought about whether your gift was given to me in earnest or in jest, and I am very much taken to the former notion, which has made me smile so happily now and then.

(With) that having been written, I must confess that I am enchanted.

I am enchanted by your bravery, your sense of duty, your character; I am bewitched by your persistence and the faint echoes of a smile, which always seem to stir fancifully at your lips; I am fascinated with your resolve, and how much you believe in yourself; your confidence, your wit, everything about you and by you I find endlessly beautiful.

When the drudgeries of formal business are all done with and Apollo retires to his heavenly chambers, I too long for one with whom I may exchange words of languor and tired satisfaction.

I wish to run my hands through your ruffled hair, to undo the rigid formality you had so meticulously adorned yourself with; I wish to speak with you about trivial matters of no import, trifles which are curiously romantic and utterly useless; I wish to immerse myself in the lively river of your personality, your charm, your entire being.

And yet I am afraid to pursue you as madly as Apollo had with his forgotten fancies, for they all ended in metamorphoses, which left him so solitary.

In this bustling city of elegance and vulgarity, we are so often entangled in politics and disagreement, but let me reassure you that for you my door is always open.

For you my soul is green.

Caelius

Because of you, each day is a melon slice
smelling sweetly of earth.
Because of you, all fruits reach out to me
as if I were the sun.
Thanks to you, I live on the honey of hope.

∆ Nazim Hikmet, opening lines to “Because of You,” American Poetry Review (vol. 31, no. 1, January/Feburary 2002)

Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship Can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships.

Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love.

My new theory of relationships: the default state should be really easy, effortless, and fluid, and then when you work hard, it’s to protect and restore the default state. If the default configuration of the relationship is Difficult or Lacking Something, it’s probably Not Right.

Definition of love: "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth".

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

The brain systems of love.

"If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one."

I have already proposed that there are lovers who stand out from the rest because we experience them as so irreplaceable that even a definitive parting of ways does not entirely banish their imprint. The reason for this is that such lovers touch what I would like to call the "bedrock" of our desire. This bedrock is the deepest kernel of our being, articulating what is most archaic, least socialized (and therefore most idiosyncratic) about us, particularly about our ways of seeking satisfaction in the world. As a consequence, whenever a lover manages to awaken this kernel, he or she almost by definition cuts into unconscious layers of our interiority that are absolutely fundamental to our being yet also a little mysterious-shrouded, as they are, in the impenetrable mists of our prehistory. More specifically, such a lover activates currents of desire that are so essential to our sense of self that we would not recognize ourselves without them.

In chapter 1 l mentioned that although we may, across the span of our lives, meet numerous people who pique our curiosity, there are usually only a few who raise our passion to a feverish pitch. Those who do are the ones who-often unintentionally and without being fully aware of their power-brush against the bedrock of our desire. They stir our desire on such a primary level that we sense that our destiny is inextricably intertwined with theirs. This is how we sometimes come to feel that certain people are "fated" for us-that we do not have a choice but to respect the thrust of our desire even when this desire gets us in trouble.

| Mari Ruti, from The Summons of Love

“Some authors today argue that romantic love is such an illusion that we need to distrust it and keep our wits about us so that we are not lead astray. But warnings like this betray a distrust of the soul. We may need to be cured by love of our attachment to life without fantasy. Maybe one function of love is to cure us of an anemic imagination, a life emptied of romantic attachment and abandoned to reason. “

The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate you, and who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel... This is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure... and I would like to be for you the companion you are sure of, always.

Gentleness is stronger than severity,
water is stronger than rock,
love is stronger than force.

— Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse