Defining Love

[~Dream~]

LOve is when your heart sings at just the mention of His name,it's when you Yearn for his touch,and cant wait to get swept away in his eyes that look deep inside and see the REAL you..and still Loves ya for WHO you really are...

To me its a never-ending aching when you are miles apart ,cause some how you feel less Complete without him ..

 

[midwestyankee]

LOve is when your heart sings at just the mention of His name,it's when you Yearn for his touch,and cant wait to get swept away in his eyes that look deep inside and see the REAL you..and still Loves ya for WHO you really are...

To me its a never-ending aching when you are miles apart ,cause some how you feel less Complete without him ..

There is a song with no words or tune that only lovers know. She writes her verse and I write mine. Together we sing, apart we sing - always the same song.

 

[~Dream~]

There is a song with no words or tune that only lovers know. She writes her verse and I write mine. Together we sing, apart we sing - always the same song.

there is a melody that only He can play ..thats heard ever so softly by my soul....there is a touch ,His touch that can make me melt and a soft kiss that enchants me like no other before him has ever done..

 

[Peteslaw2]

like to think???? its a fact ...case closed!!!! see you saturday not good sailing weather

Ok, the case is closed. Bring your foul weather gear. You might get wet.

 

[DLL]

Originally posted by Peteslaw2
Ok, the case is closed. Bring your foul weather gear. You might get wet.

 

[DLL]

[No message]

 

[DLL]

Originally posted by Ammo44
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa......but I hope to get to third base with you...........

 

[Sappholovers]

love is

Quickly, two words immediately come to my mind when I think about love: openness and connection.

My love for someone...or something ....makes me feel so open to the world.... it's the arousal of all the senses and of the mind's eye and the heart's ear.... it makes you more attentive to nature and to the better angels of our nature

Loves makes you feel more metaphorical....as if you always want to conjugate and copulate in language, linking things unlike through metaphor and simile..... It suffuses me with a desire to make connections, see connections, want connections... the connections of a simile, the connections of mind and heart and body.

Digression: Just as I feel you can only love one woman at a time, I also feel you can only hate one president at a time. My hatred of Nixon is giving way to a deeper hatred of George W. Bush.

Where did I learn about love? My first crush was on Willie Mays. I loved sports....and I loved books.....as a kid. My mother taught me one version of love. Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" taught me another as did Renaissance poetry and drama.

My favorite book about love: Ethel Person's "Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion."

 

[DLL]

Originally posted by midwestyankee
There is a song with no words or tune that only lovers know. She writes her verse and I write mine. Together we sing, apart we sing - always the same song.

 

[GiveawayGirl]

Re: love is

Digression: Just as I feel you can only love one woman at a time, I also feel you can only hate one president at a time. My hatred of Nixon is giving way to a deeper hatred of George W. Bush.

A very thought provoking post.

I believe that hate has many facets and levels just as love does.

Just as you can love your mother in one way, a book in another, and your soulmate in yet another .......so can you hate with different intensities and in different ways.

You can hate one president in a sucked-down-by-your-own-stupidity-and-corruption way, yet you can hate another in a sick-to-your-stomach-moving-to-Canada way.


(Sorry yank, you know I couldn't let it pass untouched)

 

[Sappholovers]

Shades of hate

I love the ending of the movie "Dick." It has one of my favorite endings of any movie. The young women who help expose the cover-ups of Nixon spread a banner on their roof for Nixon to see as he is leaving the White House by helicopter after his resignation. The banner reads: "You suck Dick."

GiveawayGirl: Please feel no need to apologize to this Yank. Your comment offered, in a quick dose, the same therapeutic smile as the ending of "Dick."

You have me thinking more about how to describe the heart-sadness, gut-sickness, and mind-fury I am feeling over this war..... I want to describe it as Bush's war, but too many Americans gave it their sanction.....in their delusion, their trust, their need for revenge.

Robert Frost said a poet should have a lover's quarrel with the world. I have an ongoing lover's quarrel with the United States, and the state of my quarrel right now, thanks to Bush's blundering (which could make him the worst president of the past 100 years), has made me eye, with the longing of a confirmed adulterer, the social and political policies of Canada, Holland, Sweden......

 

[GiveawayGirl]

I apologize to my good friend yankee only because I shamelessly hijack his thread for my own purposes whenever the needs suits.

I will not allow myself to even begin to address the rest of this post........I might be here all night

 

[midwestyankee]

I apologize to my good friend yankee only because I shamelessly hijack his thread for my own purposes whenever the needs suits.

I will not allow myself to even begin to address the rest of this post........I might be here all night

GG, I'm glad you kept to your better judgment here. I'm afraid that if you hadn't, I would have joined in and soon the mods might have banned the thread to the GB. No thanks, that's not my favorite neighborhood.

 

[~Dream~]

Dream.... heres the poem i promised a little later but better late than never.... Hope you like it

We visit the World
For only a moment
And that moment
Is known as Life

During this time
We learn about laughter
But also about tears
We find more questions
Than we do answers
We experience the joy
Of new arrivals
And feel the sadness
Of loved ones departures
So we must try
To live every second
For oh, so quickly
Our Moment is gone
DLL

hope you like it....(i just lost someone that played such an important role in who I am now) , not the perverted sex crazed part mind you...so it seemed good for me too....
Have a great weekend..i will be away for a few days see you all wed...

* cries* that was Beautiful and so kind of you to write DLL ,thanks very much sweety x12

 

[midwestyankee]

Dream.... heres the poem i promised a little later but better late than never.... Hope you like it

We visit the World
For only a moment
And that moment
Is known as Life

During this time
We learn about laughter
But also about tears
We find more questions
Than we do answers
We experience the joy
Of new arrivals
And feel the sadness
Of loved ones departures
So we must try
To live every second
For oh, so quickly
Our Moment is gone
DLL

hope you like it....(i just lost someone that played such an important role in who I am now) , not the perverted sex crazed part mind you...so it seemed good for me too....
Have a great weekend..i will be away for a few days see you all wed...

DLL, we're sorry to hear about your loss. You seem to have captured some of the pain and joy that comes with these moments quite well here.

 

[midwestyankee]

Re: love is

Quickly, two words immediately come to my mind when I think about love: openness and connection.

My love for someone...or something ....makes me feel so open to the world.... it's the arousal of all the senses and of the mind's eye and the heart's ear.... it makes you more attentive to nature and to the better angels of our nature

Loves makes you feel more metaphorical....as if you always want to conjugate and copulate in language, linking things unlike through metaphor and simile..... It suffuses me with a desire to make connections, see connections, want connections... the connections of a simile, the connections of mind and heart and body.

<snip>

Where did I learn about love? My first crush was on Willie Mays. I loved sports....and I loved books.....as a kid. My mother taught me one version of love. Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" taught me another as did Renaissance poetry and drama.

My favorite book about love: Ethel Person's "Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion."

Sappholovers, this is quite provocative - in the very best sense of the word.

I agree with your experience. Loving well does open up our consciousness. I can't say why or how, but I have felt it work that way. Not only do we start seeing the world around us in terms of stimuli that remind us of our beloved but we also start noticing other things - particularly things of elegance and beauty - that we never saw before. And before anyone gets on my case about elegance and beauty, let me point out that the solution to a challenging problem can have elegance and beauty.

And thank you for bringing books into the discussion once again.

Welcome. I hope you'll return many times.

 

[Cathleen]

I am watching the dedication of the WWII Memorial and can't help but think of love. The love these men and women had for their country. It is awesome. It took too long for this memorial to become realized and it is a lovely site to behold.

Sappho, I too thought your words were thought provoking and very heartfelt. I have taken your words almost as a challenge. I am a believer in mindfulness in all matters of life. It is through awareness that I learn, change and become open as well. A gift of love is the eyeopening of not just our physical senses but of our soul. To become a truly living being. With all the complication love can bring, the gifts far greater.

I agree too with you Yank, there can be beauty and elegance in conflict and challenge. I see this in my own life everyday. From the depths of abuse there can come an appreciation for kindness, given and received. From the sadness of neglect can come the joy of being apart of something or someone.

I won't say I am glad for my past, but I will not say either that it was a death sentence. I am living proof to myself each day that there can be beauty and elegance in challenge. I believe it is a Grace that has been given to me and I cherish it each day.

 

[Sappholovers]

A favorite vision of love

Here is a passage from Ethel Person's "Dreams of Love and other Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion." It offers one of my favorite visions of love as it discusses the connection between the transformations that can occur as we read great literature and as we love.


"In part, love acts as change-agent because it is an explorative, imaginative transaction between two people, a partial escape from our own unremitting subjectivity into another's. And in this it resembles, though it exceeds by far, the liberation we sometimes experience reading great literature. Perhaps the reason that fiction has so successfully claimed love as its province is that fiction and love--at their respective bests--do something similar: they enable their adherents (readers and lovers) to enter into another consciousness. In the case of fiction, the consciousness entered is, most immediately, that of the character through whose eyes we are seeing events, but ultimately it is that of the author. In love the consciousness we share is that of our beloved.
At its most sublime, then, love offers us the rare opportunity to liberate ourselves from our own subjectivity. The state of mind that enables this to occur is empathy, not complete identification. One feels with one's beloved, one does not become one's beloved. Imagination--the act of mind and spirit that love and literature have in common--may be so pleasurable precisely because of the fine line it lives on, the line between identifying with and submerging one's identity in an Other. In love the balancing act required to remain on that line creates a tension that is both intensely pleasurable and potentially problematic....
Love, like other psychological and spiritual odysseys, is never final but holds forth the promise of continual unfolding, it we will only keep ourselves open to its challenge....As a creative act, love has much in common with creative work in general and is thus well described in the work of Silvano Arieti, who described creativity as having a dual role: "at the same time as it enlarges the universe by adding or uncovering new dimensions, it also enriches and expands man, who will be able to experience these new dimensions inwardly."

 

[midwestyankee]

Sappholovers, thank you for sharing that illuminating passage. I concur entirely.

What is especially touching (to me) is the image of that "line between identifying with and submerging one's identity in an Other." That line, like so many we walk in our lives, sometimes meanders in front of us. Occasionally it disappears from conscious sight. But it always returns if we take the care to look for it.

I have long believed that such lines define our existence.

 

[Sappholovers]

Another perspective on love

Here's another perspective I like on love. It's from Natalie Angier's book, "Woman: An Intimate Geography," which won a Pulitzer Prize. It has been called a beautiful work of "joyous liberation biology." In a chapter entitled "Labor of Love: The Chemistry of Human Bondage," she writes:

"We humans also love because we think too much. We need to have our thoughts periodically shaken up and rearranged, like chromosomes, or like the immune molecules that fight disease. Allison Jolly, a primatologist, has compared the benefits of intelligence to the benefits of sexual reproduction. Both are systems for transferring information between individuals. Both allow information from different sources to be combined and used by one individual. If sex evolved so that you children are not condemned to be just like you, she said, then intelligence means that you are not condemned to remain just like yourself....We love for posterity and protection, to preserve the self and to set the self aside. We love for the sake of fending off boredom and mental calcification.... When intelligent and articulate women have created the men of their dreams, as the great female novelists of history have done, the men read like the men of many women's dreams, for they are men who love women of strength and intelligence, who do not want their women emotionally and intellectually spayed ancd chastened."

 

[Cathleen]

Did she say where a woman would find such a man??

I'm sorry, I just had to do it. Its nothing personal, but damn I can imagine a good man.

Thanks Sappho, another nice addition.

 

[Cathleen]

Sappholovers, thank you for sharing that illuminating passage. I concur entirely.

What is especially touching (to me) is the image of that "line between identifying with and submerging one's identity in an Other." That line, like so many we walk in our lives, sometimes meanders in front of us. Occasionally it disappears from conscious sight. But it always returns if we take the care to look for it.

I have long believed that such lines define our existence.

Yank, I'm not sure of your meaning here. But it seems like losing yourself, your identity to the other. I fear that.

Am I misinterpreting your words?

 

[midwestyankee]

Yank, I'm not sure of your meaning here. But it seems like losing yourself, your identity to the other. I fear that.

Am I misinterpreting your words?

You're exactly right, Cathleen. The line of which Persons spoke is the line between identifying with and submerging ourselves into the beloved. If we allow ourselves to cross over that line for too long and become submerged into our beloved, then the love becomes not so much a love as something unhealthy. We can no longer extend ourselves for our beloved because in part of our mind we have become our beloved.

One could argue that in sex we can submerge ourselves into our beloved for a time. Perhaps that's one way in which sex between beloveds is so meaningful. But we must pull away to walk on that line that separates identification with submersion because only there do we find the proper balance between personalities.

 

[midwestyankee]

Re: Another perspective on love

Here's another perspective I like on love. It's from Natalie Angier's book, "Woman: An Intimate Geography," which won a Pulitzer Prize. It has been called a beautiful work of "joyous liberation biology." In a chapter entitled "Labor of Love: The Chemistry of Human Bondage," she writes:

"We humans also love because we think too much. We need to have our thoughts periodically shaken up and rearranged, like chromosomes, or like the immune molecules that fight disease. Allison Jolly, a primatologist, has compared the benefits of intelligence to the benefits of sexual reproduction. Both are systems for transferring information between individuals. Both allow information from different sources to be combined and used by one individual. If sex evolved so that you children are not condemned to be just like you, she said, then intelligence means that you are not condemned to remain just like yourself....We love for posterity and protection, to preserve the self and to set the self aside. We love for the sake of fending off boredom and mental calcification.... When intelligent and articulate women have created the men of their dreams, as the great female novelists of history have done, the men read like the men of many women's dreams, for they are men who love women of strength and intelligence, who do not want their women emotionally and intellectually spayed ancd chastened."

What's not to like about "women of strength and intelligence?"

It is sad to think - and know, actually - that so many men insist on taking partners who are "emotionally and intellectually spayed and chastened." Love is a partnership. If you were setting out to create a successful partnership in any enterprise, would you not choose a skilled and knowledgeable person? Would you really select someone of little skill for some undertaking that you prized? That, to me, is sheer idiocy.

 

[wicked woman]

Re: Re: Another perspective on love

Originally posted by midwestyankee
What's not to like about "women of strength and intelligence?"

It is sad to think - and know, actually - that so many men insist on taking partners who are "emotionally and intellectually spayed and chastened." Love is a partnership. If you were setting out to create a successful partnership in any enterprise, would you not choose a skilled and knowledgeable person? Would you really select someone of little skill for some undertaking that you prized? That, to me, is sheer idiocy.

One of the reasons you are a wise man Yankee...