Tag Archives: #love

03Jan/18
Love

LOVE is the answer…

Life, ,

so what is the question….

Love

Love…yes..that is the answer…

I was pondering what my “word” for 2018 would be for a few days…I couldn’t come up with one. I thought of a few but then discarded them like the wrapping paper from my Christmas presents. None of the words I came up with totally expressed exactly what I wanted to feel and project this year. Some felt right at first… but then didn’t after I let them sit for a bit.

Why, you ask is this “word” so important? Well let me explain it to you. I used to do the whole New Year’s resolutions thing and then at the end of January I had not accomplished even a single one and would just forget about them. This whole process made me feel like such a loser. Why couldn’t I keep my resolutions? Other people I knew could, why couldn’t I? I think maybe it was because there was so much pressure to do it that I decided I just couldn’t and stopped…before I failed.

I had heard about selecting a word…a single word that made you feel your word and react to it all year long. My first “word” was JOY! I needed some joy in my life at the time and decided it would be a good word for me. I experienced much joy that year and people in my life embraced it as well and helped me find my JOY… I am still tied to that word as I feel drawn to it somehow. It speaks to me. I think your “word” should do that.

“Words are all we have.” ~ Samuel Beckett

So back to the task at hand…picking one for this year. I knew what I wanted from this year…what I wanted this year to be about. I wrote what I wanted in my journal and here is what I wrote...I want to love what I am spending my time on…I want to love what I do….I want to love life again and feel like I am sending that out to the universe and hopefully get it back..I want to let all the people I love know how much I love them and show them…I want to show the love I had/have for my son and somehow use that love to honor his life. And then almost magically… there it was..It’s funny how for some reason I didn’t see it even though it was right there in front of me….the answer was LOVE.

Wow. It was so easy and I made it so hard. As I sat there pondering my word a blue jay flew onto my porch. He looked around and then he stared right through the window at me…shook his head and flew off. Yes, LOVE.. was truly my word. I believe in signs and that was a sign if I ever saw one.

Now onto what I want to gain from this “love”….I want to believe that all things are possible just like I did when I was a child. I know that sometimes they just aren’t.. but I want to believe they are. I want to love each day and look forward to what the day holds. I want to be open to any and all possibilities. I want to use all the talents and abilities I was born with and not waste them. I do love to write and I am doing that with this blog. I am so proud of the fact that I have continued doing this for almost 3 years now. I also love to make jewelry and have stopped doing that. I made a promise to myself to start making jewelry again this year.

I have tried and tried this past year, to come up with a way that would honor my son, Dave and that it would somehow make a difference in the world. I know that is no small undertaking but I hope to come up with a way to do both this year. It doesn’t need to be a huge earth shattering difference..however that would be great….a small one would do! If anyone has any ideas on how I could accomplish this, please leave your ideas in a comment below.

I am so grateful for finally finding my word for 2018! By the way, grateful was my word for last year. LOVE..isn’t is a beautiful word? Don’t you wish there was more of it in our world today? Maybe this could be a small step for us all to spread more love…I am certainly going to try! Do you pick a “word?” And if you do, what word did you pick?

“Words. So powerful. They can crush a heart, or heal it. They can shame a soul, or liberate it. They can shatter dreams, or energize them. They can obstruct connection, or invite it. They can create defenses, or melt them. We have to use words wisely.” ~ Jeff Brown

17Mar/17
Love

I Want To Know What Love Is!

Life, , ,

thank you Foreigner, so do I…

Love

What is Love?

Really, I am asking you…what is love? Is it the thing we see in the movies between a man and a woman? Is it the way it is in the countless books we have read? Surely it’s not the childhood fairly tales where Prince Charming finally shows up with the shoe or kisses us out of a deep sleep. And by the way, if I have to wear a glass shoe, then just no..

If it’s not that then what is it? I don’t know the answer, hence the reason for my question. So if you came here looking for answers you came to the wrong place. I thought I was in love several times in my life. But was I? From everything I have read and heard about how it is supposed to be and feel, maybe I never really was…

There are many different kinds of love..at least I think so anyway. Love of our parents and grandparents, love of our children and grandchildren, love of other family members and our friends who we love like family, even the love of our dear sweet pets. But what is the love between a man and a woman supposed to be like and is it meant to last forever? Can it?

I looked up the word “love” on Dictionary.com and here are a few of the definitions it had listed:

  1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
  2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection as for a parent, child or friend.
  3. sexual passion or desire.
  4. an object or thing so liked.
  5. a score as in tennis of zero or nothing.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere. Thank you so much Dictionary.com! I feel a little better now…maybe I “have” loved. I certainly have had a “profoundly tender, passionate affection” for a man a time or two….maybe more. I definitely have had and still have  “a deep affection” for my parents, children and friends. I won’t bore you with all the “sexual passion or desire” encounters I have had. My “thing so liked”…. I love to write. And as for the “zero” thing, yeah, had that a time or two as well. Alright!!!

Even after reading the definitions of “love“…. and admitting to have felt each of them at least once or twice, my question still remains. What is love? Does the very fact that I ask this question mean I haven’t had true love or the everlasting love we hear can exist? The kind of love that endures many years as in a long marriage…when one person dies the other isn’t far behind… the love that lasts forever. But does it? When I got married I believed it did. I believed our love would. But it didn’t. He didn’t love me enough to be faithful and I didn’t love him enough to overlook it. I loved him for many years after our divorce. Or maybe I just loved the thought of him and what could have been. He was my first love..maybe that is why I still think of him from time to time and wonder.

I had a dream last night about another one of my “loves”, it is what made me think about all of this in the first place. I woke up wondering why I had dreamt about him when I hadn’t seen or heard from him in 25 years. And then I wondered, did I love him… Was I in love with this guy 25 years ago or was it something else? I felt like I was at the time but when something doesn’t last we are very quick to think it can’t be real. So does the fact our relationship didn’t lead to marriage or last more than a few years make it any less of one than the couples that stay together forever?

“Love is all you need” ~ John Lennon

Here is what I think real love is… It means you can’t do anything wrong, the person that loves you will love you and you will work out any and all your problems. This doesn’t mean you can abuse the love or the person. That isn’t what love is. The reason you can work out your problems is that you have an underlying basis of trust and respect. If you have that you can surmount any problems that come up. But if that trust is ever broken, it is very hard to repair it. If not impossible. And it is very hard to open yourself up fully to another after going through that in a relationship.

Good times are wonderful..but bad times do happen. Only if you have that solid underlying trust, respect and true love will your relationship survive. We can’t change people or force them to be something they aren’t. They either have these traits or they don’t. This is true in any relationship, not just the one between a man and a woman. If you have a friend or family member who you can’t trust completely or they try to change you and don’t respect the person you are.. then it is time to move away from that relationship. We must be true to ourselves. We have to first love ourself enough to step away to be able to become the person we want and need to be. The person we truly are. I have made the mistake of sacrificing who I was a few times to keep the relationship. It doesn’t work and the relationship still ends. I will never do it again.

So back to the question I asked, “what is love?” I’m going to go out on a limb here after thinking about all of this and say I think I may “have” been in “love” once or twice in my life. I think there are different levels and different kinds of love. I am not sure if what I have experienced was “real love.” One thing I don’t even have to think about and I am definitely sure of is that I have the real thing with my family and the great friends I have in my life right now… at this moment in time. While I don’t have a special man in my life, I would like to believe enough in love that maybe that could still happen one day. Ok, now I know I’m starting to sound like the fairy tale books I read as a kid..but maybe that is what I need…what we all need…something to believe in…to think maybe just maybe that guy will ride up to my door in his “white car” and whisk me away. Who knows, crazier things have happened…

Do you believe in real love? The kind that lasts forever, that kind of love…

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.” ― Oscar Wilde.