Sometimes -- just sometimes -- when we simply STOP; close our eyes and take several deep, cleansing breaths, we are ready to begin reflection by entering the silent sanctuary within to begin the incredible, SIMPLY AMAZING, journey of self-discovery as we connect with our metaphoric hearts and souls. Please join me.
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Friday, February 14, 2014
A Brief Discourse on the Reality of Love
NounAn
intense feeling of deep affection: "their love for their country".
Love isn't blind or deaf or dumb - in fact it sees far more than it will
ever tell. It is going beyond yourself and stretching who you are for someone
else. Being in love entails
seeing someone as you wish they were: to love them is to see who they really
are and still care for them. Love isn't bitter, but you can't have love without
pain: sacrifice is the hallmark of love, the coin of love.
Being in love usually is used in a romantic sense when you meet your
significant other transforming a normal relationship into a deeper one without
further interest in others.
Love means that you trust the person, would do anything for the person, know
that person is with you through thick and thin, isn't afraid to be seen with
you. make sure they treat you right.
This is a heavily debated topic. People often try to define love in terms of
romantic euphoria; however, the word “love” generally is used so loosely that
its meaning can become diluted. The truth is, “love” often is used to describe
other emotions or strong feelings. Using the word “love” just saves us the
trouble of having to figure out what we’re actually feeling. We can say we
“love” anything, but what does love really mean to us?
Nathan Feiles
is a counselor in New York City who specializes in relationships, fear of
flying, life adjustments, anxiety, and stress & migraines. He is also the
creator of Fear of Flying?...Not Anymore!, a unique program that helps people
conquer fear of flying. Please visit his website and blog at www.therapynathan.wordpress.com
for more information.
Broken promises
surround those who look for love in the wrong places. When the person who
promised to be there forever is not around anymore, when the pursuit of
happiness loses its appeal, or when the passion that fueled your commitment
cools, what then? Where is the meaning of love in those moments? Instead of
looking for love, let's have and possess love; let's claim the love we've been
shown and the love we've known. Claim the greatest, highest sense of love as
your own, and then show that love to others.
As humans, we
consistently take the infinite and subject it to our finite understanding. We
try to know familial love, romantic love, infatuation, lust, passion, and
desire, with the hope that true love lives around the corner. We try to divorce
love from people by loving jobs, money, status, objects, and appearances. We
try the opposite and look for love in people through relationships,
friendships, socializing, and sex. We fail, spectacularly and repeatedly, to
realize that none of those things are love. Even following your dreams, your
heart, and your calling are merely noble ideas compared to love's great,
uncontainable force. Sooner or later, the things we mistakenly call by love's
name will reveal themselves to be incapable of holding that value.
Love is
everlasting and seeks expression. Love is deep and incomprehensible. True love
has eternal, unfailing depth and worth. Love with and through your art, your
relationships, and your dreams, rather than seeking meaning in those things
alone. To know love and to show love is to believe in eternal value.
Your heart races
every time he calls and your palms sweat whenever he's near. You think he may
be "the one." But how do you know if this is the real thing?
Dennis Neder,
author of Being a Man in a Woman's
World (Remington Publications, 2000), says love has three stages: the
infatuation stage, the bonding stage and the familiar stage. Dr. Neder, an
ordained minister and doctor of metaphysics, says it helps to consider all
three stages when determining if you have the real thing.
The infatuation
stage is when you can't wait to be with the other person. This is the romantic
stage of love, says Dr. Neder, who warns that this is the stage when people
thinks it's "the real thing." But this stage lasts only a short time.
The second
stage, says Dr. Neder, is the bonding stage. During this stage you get to know
the other person and you start planning aspects of your life around them. If
you continue through this stage you eventually enter the third stage, or what
Dr. Neder calls "the familiar phase."
In the familiar
stage you've established a pattern that involves the other person. "Your
lives become intertwined and merged," Dr. Neder says. "You know
foundationally how the other person feels about almost everything. And
interestingly," says Dr. Neder, "you also become refocused on you
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse A
persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa
fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma
perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno
vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, Senza
tema d'infamia ti rispondo.*
[If I believed that my reply
were
A person who never returned to the world,
This flame without more staria shock.
But for they never have to this fund
I have not been any live, s'i'odo the truth,
Without fear of infamy I answer.
*from Google translation]
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep… tired… or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at
all.
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Commenary by John Paul
Riquelme
The
complications of "Prufrock" involve from the poem's beginning a more
direct transformation of the dramatic monologue than does "Gerontion"
when the pronouns that "I" uses suggest the presence of an
unspecified listener. In many dramatic monologues the listener is also not
specified, and the reader is invited to take over the role of listener in a
one-sided conversation. In "Prufrock," however, it is not clear
whether a real conversation is being dramatically presented, whether the
"I" is having an internal colloquy with himself, or whether the
reader is being addressed directly. The "you" that is "I"'s
counterpart stands in two places at once, both inside and outside Prufrock's
mind and inside and outside scenes that can with difficulty be imagined based
on the minimal details provided. The reader's situation resembles the position
of the viewer of Velásquez's "Las Meninas," in which a mirror invites
an identification with the observers of the scene depicted in the painting
while the painting's geometry indicates that the illusion of that
identification can be sustained only by ignoring obvious details. Reader and
viewer stand both inside and outside the frame of an illusion that cannot be
sustained.
Two epigraphs
from Dante precede and follow the poem's title, one for the entire volume that
takes its name from "Prufrock," the other for the poem itself, which
stands first in the volume. Together they suggest the oscillation and
indeterminacy of Prufrock's position and the reader's. In the first epigraph,
Statius mistakes Virgil's shade for a "solid thing" and forgets momentarily
what he himself is and can do. In the second, Guido da Montefeltro predicates
his address to Dante on the opposite mistake, that Dante is not human and
cannot carry his words further. Like Statius and Guido, the reader who tries to
pin down the indeterminate identities and locations of "you and I" in
the poem will always be mistaken. What is taken for a shade or a figment may be
flesh and blood, and what is taken for living flesh may be only a figment in a
perpetual instability that marks "Prufrock," like "Rhapsody,"
as the transforming end of a sequence of poems to which it can be said to
belong but some of whose implications it subverts. The subversion occurs
largely through the removal of those referential, seemingly stable elements of
scene and character that contribute to making the illusion of hearing a
personal voice in poetry possible.
Eliot's
particular transformation of the dramatic monologue in "Prufrock"
depends on the character of the pronouns "you" and "I,"
which linguists call "shifters" because they are mutually defining
and depend for their meanings on the pragmatic context of the discourses in
which they occur. Instead of naming something unchanging, these pronouns
indicate positions that can be variously occupied.
J. Alfred
Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the
Representative Man of early Modernism. Shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually
retarded (many have said impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the
point of solipsism, as he says, "Am an attendant lord, one that will do /To swell a progress, start a scene
or two." Nothing revealed the Victorian upper classes in Western society
more accurately, unless it was a novel by Henry James, and nothing better
exposed the dreamy, insubstantial center of that consciousness than a
half-dozen poems in Eliot's first book. The speakers of all these early poems
are trapped inside their own excessive alertness. They look out on the world
from deep inside some private cave of feeling, and though they see the world
and themselves with unflattering exactness, they cannot or will not do anything
about their dilemma and finally fall back on self-serving explanation. They
quake before the world, and their only revenge is to be alert. After Prufrock and Other Observations,poetry started coming from the city
and from the intellect. It could no longer stand comfortably on its old post-Romantic
ground, ecstatic before the natural world.
