Love As Deeply As If It Were Forever

You have always been in love. You will always be in love.

In fact, it is impossible for you NOT to be in love. You would be unable to get out of bed each morning unless there were someone or something that roused your heart and stirred your imagination.

So please admit that you are alive because of love; that you are MADE of love.

I invite you to write a list of five things you love and devote some time in the coming days to expressing your appreciation.




LOVE LOVES LOVE

Time for some Love Bombs:

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Be my ruckus, my perfect non-sequitur. Be my circuit-breaker, my lengthening shadows at dusk, my nest of pine needles, my second-story window. Be my if-you-stare-long-enough-you’ll-see. Be my subatomic particle.

Be my backbeat, my key of C minor, my surly apostle, my scandalous reparté, my maximum payload. Be my simmering, seething, flickering, radiating, shimmering, and undulating.”

—Andrew Varnon

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I love you between shadow and soul. I love you as the plant that hasn’t bloomed yet, and carries hidden within itself the light of flowers.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. Because of you, the dense fragrance that rises from the earth lives in my body, rioting with hunger for the eternity of our victorious kisses.

—Pablo Neruda

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Let’s heat up the night to a boil. Let’s cook every drop of liquid out of our flesh till we sizzle, not a drop of come left. We are pots on too high a flame.

Our insides char and flake dark like sinister snow idling down. We breathe out smoke. We die out and sleep covers us in ashes. We lie without dreaming, empty as clean grates.

Yet we wake rebuilt, clattering and hungry as waterfalls leaping off, rushing into the day, roaring our bright intentions. It is the old riddle in the Yiddish song, what can burn and not burn up, a passion that gives birth to itself every day.

—Marge Piercy

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You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day’s wage.

You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.

—George Bernard Shaw

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The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy. The merest whisper of your name awakes in me a shuddering sixth sense. I am longing for a kiss that makes time stand still.

—(The preceding testimony is a blend of words from Edgar Allan Poe, Pamela Moore, and John Keats.)

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Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.

—Erica Jong

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We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute, so that we can cry out with loving. Would you rather throw stones at a mirror? I am your mirror and here are the stones.

—Rumi

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I love you more than it’s possible to love anyone. I love you more than love itself. I love you more than you love yourself. I love you more than God loves you.

I love you more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the history of the universe. In fact, I love you more than I love you.

—A voice in your dream

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For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.

—James Hillman

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Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

—Emily Dickinson

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Holding your hand, I can hear your bones singing into mine and feel the moon as it rolls through you.

—Sara Eliza Johnson

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Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body’s deeper need, the need for genuine love.

Every time you are able to go beyond the body’s superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

—Henri Nouwen

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The giving of love is an education in itself.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

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The bottom line for those of us who love humanity, not just our tribe, not just our own selfish interests, is this: What are the most effective actions that we can take that will reduce the amount of suffering in the world and save peoples' and animals' lives?

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Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

—Audre Lorde





YOU HAVE TO LOVE

Louise Erdrich writes: Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum





HOW TO PRIME YOUR ECSTATIC SKILLS

Nothing primes your ecstatic skill better than invoking and expressing thanks. So consider the possibility of celebrating regular Gratitude Fests. During these orgies of appreciation, you could confer praise and respect on the creatures, both human and otherwise, that have played seminal roles in inspiring you to become yourself.

Who teaches and helps you? Who sees you for who you really are? Who nudges you in the direction of your fuller destiny and awakens you to your signature truths? Who loves you brilliantly?