To The Rose

That which God said to the rose,
and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty,
He said to my heart,
and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
Rumi

Gold Medal rose

    Last week I planted a gorgeous yellow rose in my garden. It is called the "Gold Medal"  rose and has beautiful perfumed flowers. When you come close to the rose and bend over its pretty petals, do you hear a sweet laughter? When love enters your heart through your eyes, or through your nose with the fragrance of a flower, or through a word whispered in your ear, we are transformed into something more beautiful. Imagine you are the rose. Imagine someone says something to you that makes you more beautiful. 

   Robert Burns, a Scottish poet and lyricist, wrote:

O my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
O my Luve's like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune. 

     When we love, we become something more beautiful than we were. We hear melodies that are soft and sweet like a rose.
 If we could look into our hearts, like Rumi did, we would see a rose even more beautiful than that pictured above. All living things, Rumi appears to be saying, are transformed by love.
When your heart is transformed by love you can see a red, blue, or a gold rose.

Love Is Blind

The Lovers

The Lovers is a painting by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, created in 1928. 

"The painting depicts a veiled couple embracing and kissing. Obviously symbolic, many have speculated about why the couple is veiled. Many have also interpreted the painting in different ways – the common interpretation being 'Love is blind'."

Do you have any opinions about the meaning of the painting? 

The Lovers can be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

After her first husband was killed in a motorcycle accident, a woman told me, "for her second marriage, it didn't matter what he looked like, as long as he was good with her kids."
The white shrouds, that hide the faces of these lovers, seem to me to also symbolize that love survives even death.

The couple press into each other for "Just A Kiss" ( on your lips in the moonlight?)
Watch a living video of The Lovers. The film is a moving tribute to the mystery of love.

Everything Is Illuminated

“Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.” 
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Maple Tree

  Out of darkness or night comes light. Love, like the sun, awakens us and illuminates everything so that even an old or petrified body can be nourished by it. The light of a new day or a new romance  stops us and forces us to look more carefully. It penetrates through and reaches our inner darkness.When love is strong, it guides you to safety, like a beam from a lighthouse. So does this music.

Bucket List

Keith Urban said playing his guitar in Penn Station in New York City is one of the things on his Bucket List. He can cross that off now. What's on your list?

Her are a few aquatic thoughts on my list:

1. Kissing in the rain
2. Kissing under water
3. Visiting the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland
4. Reading this book called

Only One You by Linda Kranz

Love Is The Only Gold

In Act IV of Tennyson's play Becket, two characters meet and speak to each other:

ELEANOR: We can't all of us be as pretty as thou art--... Come, here is a golden chain I will give thee if thou wilt lead me to thy mother.
GEOFFREY: No--no gold. Mother says gold spoils all. Love is the only gold.

                  Becket  (a play by Alfred Lord Tennyson)  Act 4, Scene 1 The Outskirts of the Bower


   Recently, I was driving my car when the person next to me was telling me about things she didn't have, namely, monetary and material things. I told her to look in the back seat of the car. Our children were asleep after a long plane flight from Arizona, their heads tilted and leaning toward each other against the cushions.  Pointing to both of them, I said to her, "There is all the treasure you need."
   Tennyson said it better, "Love is the only gold."

    I will look at love differently now. I will cherish it like gold and value its worth forever.

Forever Young

 "Because the people 

 who are crazy enough to think

 they can change the world are the ones who do.”  

                               ― Steve Jobs

    Steve Jobs recognized that people who "think different" 
cannot be ignored. If you "Think Different", you are either 
an icon or an outcast. Love makes us think differently too. Love 
changes our direction.  It makes us stay young. Steve Jobs met
 his future wife, Laurene Powell, in a parking lot, after noticing her 
in the front row at one of his speeches at Stanford University. 
He thought to himself,  "If this is my last night on earth,
 would I want to spend it at a business meeting or with  this woman."
 He than ran across the parking lot and asked her out to dinner. 
    Norah Jones (pictured above) plays this fitting tribute to Steve Jobs, 
who died on October 5, 2011 of pancreatic cancer. Steve loved 
certain songs too. Perhaps this is one of them.  The original troubadour,
 "misfit" and songwriter sings it below. 

Two Questions

Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, "Did you bring joy?" The second was, "Did you find joy?" ~ Leo Buscaglia

The wonderful professor Leo Buscaglia is best know for his writings and lectures on love.
He said, "When we create joy for others , sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely, we not only have lived, but we have lived for something."
   We create joy when we fill a child with the hope and dreams to explore the world, and continue their education; when we let them use their feet for walking and for dancing; and when we bring love to our relationships.
    When you find love, you have found joy. It is joyful to know that you have the love of another person. His message was to "Live fully in joy."
      Buscaglia said
        "Love is spontaneous and craves expression through joy, 
               through beauty, through truth, even through tears. 
            Love lives the moment; it's neither lost in yesteryear

               nor does it crave for tomorrow. Love is NOW!"

Listen to more of Leo Buscaglia here                

Lover's Quarrel

"Amantium irae amoris integratio est."  ~Terence

The quarrel of lovers is the renewal of love

   When two people love each other there can be irritations. "Conversations are negotiations for closeness," says professor of linguistics Deborah Tannen. Intimacy is key in a world of connection and a continuing balance act.
   Lover's quarrels are conflicts that test the relationship, but like boats that can take on water over the bow and still keep moving, the healthy relationships survive.

    The great poet Robert Frost wrote a poem stating that for his epitaph he would like the words on his tombstone to  say: "He Had A Lover's Quarrel with the World."
   Whatever his criticism of the world he may have had, he wanted us to know that his love for us is stronger.
He has given us an important message for survival. Let us remember that our arguments should bring us together. That type of love is enduring and extends beyond death. The group Shenandoah agree.

Toward the end of the war, after failing to reach agreement over how to structure the peace, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, just a week before the President died: “I regard the matter as closed and to prove my sincerity I will use one of my very few Latin quotations, ‘Amantium irae amoris integratio est.’” Translation: “Lovers’ quarrels always go with true love.”

Roosevelt and Churchill

Light in the Heart

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart”

                          ~Kahlil Gibran

Beauty that is external or on the surface will change with time. Beauty of the face is only a temporary attraction and it will change with the passing years. But the beauty of the heart is unchanged by time and circumstance. The beauty that is within radiates to all who come in contact with it.
  This deeper beauty is described in this song below called "Beneath Your Beautiful".

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful," said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Most people miss the  opportunity beneath the beautiful. Try that beauty on. That beauty lies deep beneath your clothes into that part of your soul that cannot be touched by the hands of time.