Bitter and Sweet

"To open our own heart like a Buddha, we must embrace the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows."

          ~from the Teachings of Buddha

Jon Ong's guitar video captures the beauty of love: gentle, like walking through a garden of paradise, but sometimes bitter and difficult. 

The proverb:Take the bitter with the sweet.

means to  accept the bad things as well as the good things that happen. 

 If you intend to get married, you must be prepared to take the bitter with the sweet.
It isn't easy sometimes to find the sweetness in life, but keep something sweet beside you to remind you.
Here are some tips for adding sweetness to your life.

Gifts of Joy

“Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
   ~ Mary Oliver

   Dogs love us not only because we feed them, or walk them, or groom them, or protect them, but because we are fun.  If we could love each other like dogs love us, we would increase our understanding and joy in this world.
    According to neuroeconomist  Gregory Berns, "Dogs love us for things far beyond food, basically the same things that humans love us for. Things like social comfort and social bonds.”

   When we find the right person in our lives we create a life of social comfort and increased joy. If we call this bond by its simple name, Love, we can also say, "Love is no small gift."
      

Sometimes we must recreate that moment of joy for someone who has forgotten it. Some people with Alzheimer's Disease forget who their loved ones are. This book, 

                     Creating Moments of Joy: A Journal for Caregivers seeks to provide a method of focusing our energy to create moments of joy. As Alzheimer's Disease progresses, dementia worsens and people forget who they are and who are the ones they love. "As the disease progresses, their age regresses." A person with Alzheimer's loses their short-term memory, but in early stages may remember long-term memory events. They don't recognize themselves (and talk into the mirror) and they don't  recognizes their spouses.

 It is still possible, however, to create moments of  joy for these people by re-creating a memory of something that was pleasurable in their past. Like love, these are no small treasures.

Aimless Love

LOVE   

by Billy Collins                                                              

                       

The boy at the far end of the train car
kept looking behind him
as if he were afraid or expecting someone

and then she appeared in the glass door
of the forward car and he rose
and opened the door and let her in

and she entered the car carrying
a large black case
in the unmistakable shape of a cello.

She looked like an angel with a high forehead
and somber eyes and her hair
was tied up behind her neck with a black bow.

And because of all that,
he seemed a little awkward
in his happiness to see her,

whereas she was simply there,
perfectly existing as a creature
with a soft face who played the cello.

And the reason I am writing this
on the back of a manila envelope
now that they have left the train together

is to tell you that when she turned
to lift the large, delicate cello
onto the overhead rack,

I saw him looking up at her
and what she was doing
the way the eyes of saints are painted

when they are looking up at God
when he is doing something remarkable,
something that identifies him as God.

                                         Maya Beiser - Part musician, part shaman, incomparable cellist    

                                                      Her Twitter handle is CelloGoddess

   If you meet a Goddess, whether she is unnamed or named, as in the  Greek Goddesses, it is impossible not to stare. This cello goddess (Maya Beiser) certainly leaves you with that remarkable feeling that Billy Collins describes in his poem above.

     

The Birth Of Venus by Sandro Botticelli

Hear The Bells

     If you wake up to the sound of bells ringing, then you are probably sleeping near a cathedral. This is the opening of "Antarctica", a short story by the Irish author Claire Keegan, about a woman looking for a sexual adventure around Christmastime.
     The poet Edgar Allen Poe heard wedding bells:

Hear the mellow wedding bells,

Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!Through the balmy air of night

How they ring out their delight!  
     from "The Bells"

If you are not near silver bells or golden bells, ice cubes that tinkle in a glass, sound like little bells. Sip some ice water and try to hear the bells of love calling you.

Love Whoever

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

– Kurt Vonnegut (from "The Sirens of Titan")

When we look at shows like "The Bachelor" , an expensive television show where people come from thousands of miles hoping to find a love-match and the possibility of finding a real, everlasting love, I think about those who were not chosen by the bachelor. The words of Vonnegut  describe a different purpose. Perhaps we are here, not to meet someone far away, but to find our great love among those who are around us.
     Our busy lives take us to many places: colleges away from home, military service, choosing jobs in distant locations,  or moving away from our original home. Where can we find our love? Technology has changed the way we look for love. If you find the one you love on screen or in person, hold them, tell them what is in your heart, before the wind takes them even farther away.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

 The poet A.E. Housman makes the stuff of life memorable, in his book "The Shropshire Lad"

XXXII

From far, from eve and morning
  And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
  Blew hither: here am I.
 
Now -- for a breath I tarry
  Nor yet disperse apart --
Take my hand quick and tell me,
  What have you in your heart.
 
Speak now, and I will answer;
  How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
  I take my endless way.

           ~A.E. Housman

Where Love Is Planted

"The Water Is Wide" , an Old English folksong with a long history,  has a lot of verses and many performers have played it. Each singer brings their own meaning of this song to the stage. A stanza from an early version of the ballad makes me appreciate love's unique power:

                                 Where love is planted there it grows
                                      It buds and blossoms like a rose
                                  It bears a sweet & pleasant smell
                                      There’s not a flower can it excel.

Within every person there is a rose. 

Some people do not see the rose within themselves or fail to find it in others.  One of the greatest gifts a person can possess is to be able to reach past the thorns of another, and find the rose within them. 

    Look for this symbol of love. Take time to water and admire the rose you find daily, even if that sweetness doesn't last. 

                                                                            The Pleasant Smell Of Roses

Speaking of Love

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around."

                ~Leo Buscaglia

   Leo Buscaglia, also known as "Doctor Love", was a teacher, philosopher, world traveler, best-selling author and lecturer. He is remembered for his solitary devotion to one topic: LOVE.

  If you speak one language, you’re a normal, functioning human being. If you speak two, you’re bilingual. If you speak three, you’re trilingual- four and you’re quadrilingual.  A polyglot is usually used to describe someone who speaks more than 6 languages. Alexander Arguelles, a living polyglot, has a working understanding of around 50 languages.
   The one language that is never foreign or misunderstood is love, and it often is best spoken without any words.  Love is communicated and shown with actions of respect, acceptance, kindness and tolerance. Love is a universal language.

   Love is Spoken Here

Feel The Wind

As a wind in the mountains

assaults an oak,

Love shook my breast.

    ~Sappho ( Love Poems #16)

  The wind of love is powerful. It sweeps you off  your feet and shakes you all over. It can be a rough wind or "the soft wind breathing through the grass." When you share your body and heart with another person, you feel a great passion for living. This passionate wind surrounds us. We see its beauty across fields of grain or suporting the hawks wings in the sky (Hemingway).

  It should come as no surprise that Emily Bronte felt these unquiet winds. She believed these winds of love could survive even death.  The musical group "Train' recognized that there are winds more powerful than we appreciate, even on planets other than our own.

Enjoy these quotes:

“I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Winter

"When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last;
  When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past;
  I'll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again:
  Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!"

        ~JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

    In deep winter, we dream of warmer days. Our love doesn't freeze with the winter season. There is no mountain peak or temperature too cold to snap our love. So let us join Tolkien and wait out the darkness, until we see the light of our true love again. Music, like love, helps us stay warm.