On love...

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.
-- Rumi

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One type of love may involve the two partners in each projecting an image upon the other: an image of what the loved object should be like. It may be the image that has come from their own father or mother or from some dream idyll. Having projected this image upon the partner, they then proceed to focus their love upon the image. The image may have little or no relation to the real person of the other; in fact, it may even threaten to strangle, to smother, and even to destroy the true life of the partner…Then, when the struggle for integrity fails and the projected image prevails, neither can be present to the other except in this disguise.
A higher love is two solitudes that protect and touch and greet each other. Each is willing to drop, or at least lower, the projected image and to feel an increasing sense of responsibility that the other should fulfill the mysterious destiny that God has hidden within him whether this shatters the image or not. Each counts it an infinite blessing to be able to live in the presence of the other and to be forever surprised by the joy of seeing the other grow from the deepest inner vision that is hidden in him.
-- Douglas V. Steere (Quaker philosopher) "On Being Present Where You Are"

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Why should we two ever want to part?
Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water,
we live as the great one and the little one.
As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and the little one.
This love between us goes back to the first humans;
it cannot be annihilated.
Here is Kabir’s idea: as the river gives itself into the ocean,
what is inside me moved inside you.
-- Kabir

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Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions...
-- Woody Allen

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Men are from earth; women are from earth. Deal with it.
--Unknown

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"Bart, with $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like...love!"
-- Homer Simpson

George Bush "thinks about Iraq every day"

...I am so glad to hear that. I'm sure the families of these fallen soldiers think about Iraq every day also>>>>In Memoriam

That's the day I realized (American Beauty)

...that's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things,
and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know
there was no reason to be afraid, ever.

My Lord God (Thomas Merton)

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude