Love in Action

An interesting thing happens when I move into my creative space – the universe uncovers treasures that I have kept over the years, waiting for their time to be shared. That happened after I wrote the last blog, Love is a Verb. Tucked away in a drawer, I found the following words of reflection and inspiration.

“The most important thing I know about living is love. Nothing surpasses the benefits received by a human being who makes compassion and love the objective of his or her life. For it is only by compassion and love that anyone fulfills successfully their own life’s journey. Nothing equals love.”  ~Sargent Shriver

“Like so many other things, people have misunderstood the position love has in life; they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work. – So those who love must try to act as if they had a great work to accomplish: They must be much alone and go into themselves and gather and concentrate themselves; they must work; they must become something. For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is. And those who want to have deep love in their lives must collect and save for it, and gather honey.”  ~Ranier Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

“The time will come when with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another; who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”  ~Derek Walcott

“Each man has inside him a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated, but it takes courage for a man to listen to his own inner goodness and act on it. Do we dare to be ourselves? This is the question that counts.”  ~Pablo Casals

All of these quotes spoke to me about the action of love. That it is never complacent and that to begin to put that love into action we must first truly love ourselves, and sometimes that is the hardest work of all.

May you find health and happiness along the way.

Until next time…