Human Love

Image by Christian Schloe

The Flower in My Life

“Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self.” — Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“… all about love and lovers, damsels in distress swooning in lonely lodges, postillions slaughtered all along the road, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubles of the heart, vows, sobs, tears, kisses, rowing-boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the grove, gentlemen brave as lions and gentle as lambs, too virtuous to be true, invariably well-dressed, and weeping like fountains.” — Gustave Flaubert

Romantic love is easy to ridicule, and it’s not seldom ridiculous, but I think it’s the antechamber to God’s love because it involves so much self sacrifice and persistence. I flirted around the edges of this personal version of love, with all its pitfalls and illusions, traps and woundings, that I should know a thing or…