Love Is Life!

Starting each day, I shall remind myself to reach out and touch you, gently, with my words, my eyes and with my fingers, because I don’t want to miss feeling you…
You know, I’m really convinced that if you were to define love, the only word big enough to engulf it all would be ‘life’– LOVE IS LIFE — in all its aspects…
And if you miss love, you miss life!

– Leo Buscaglia

To love is not a part of things or a part of life.
To love is the WHOLE of things and the whole of life.

–Venus de Medici

November’s Miracles

November is going to be a month of miracles. With a recent family occurrence, my life will be changing in rapid and, I am certain, profoundly enlightening ways. In looking forward to the joys and challenges of this growth opportunity I have committed to (which already has me questioning whether I am in over my head, but not once questioning the reason for my commitment),  I would like to remain in touch with the vitality of my dreams, even as I will be grounded in the reality of the moment much more frequently. It is with the intent to balance these energies, as well as the knowledge that I need to, right NOW, in any way possible, use my gifts for the concrete betterment of the world, that I have also committed to this challenge: to write a poem a day for 30 days, in support of a non-profit that works with immigrant, refugee and migrant communities to provide education and resources to learn English, become involved members of their communities, and obtain tools necessary to maintain economic independence and stability.

If you would like to support this this effort, please visit my fundraising page for more information on how you can pledge your support: http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/30miracles/30-poems-in-november

Either way, you can follow my progress toward this goal, as I will be posting my poem-a-day right here, and I hope, while they may not all be profoundly enlightening or brilliantly insightful or beautifully eloquent, that each person who reads them will be touched in some deep way, and perhaps themselves inspired to help someone else change their life for the better or to live their lives in a more soulful way. That is what I am dedicating my November to: sharing my unique gifts, and all that I have been blessed with, to help create a miracle for someone who needs one.

The only thing it takes to create a miracle in this world is to do what you love with love - to follow your own heart and express the love that flows from it as best you can. We each can be responsible for creating our own little miracles in life, for ourselves, and for others.

A Moment of Silence

For the Week of Oct 24th, 2011 –Your airy intellectual sign tends to rely a great deal on rational thinking. Logic is a great thing, yet the planetary patterns that dominate this week are much more about evoking emotions. If you apply reason to a relationship matter, you might fail to connect and understand what’s really going on. Tune in to your own non-rational senses and you will recognize what you need to do. Silence can tell you so much more than words now, so give yourself the chance to listen.

The greatest of these is…

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart:The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still knows bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any how.”

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves her. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in her, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”

- All from Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning

Ends and Beginnings

“You’re searching…
For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings – there are no such things.
There are only middles.”  ~Robert Frost, Mountain Interval, “In the Home Stretch”

 

Quote of the Week

‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.’ ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Struggle of Duende

“There are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation.” – Federico Garcia Lorca

What is duende?

Inspiration. Magic. Fire. Passion.

But it is More: Duende is a power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept.

“ I have heard an old master guitarist say: ‘Duende is not in the throat; duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action.”

How do we access it? Look to your darkness. It is there that you find your light.

Is this what Leonard Cohen meant when he sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” ?

Embrace your cracks, your imperfections, your weaknesses, your pain.

This is how you make it your strength.

 

 

I Need To Feel That Way