Spring's Reminders of Love (posted on Easter Sunday)

For those looking for the "usual" here, see the note at bottom.



in love with the new sun
the cherry blossom forgets
the night’s frost

Haiku and photo courtesy of Ivan M. Granger

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“If anyone should ask me what God is, I should answer: God is love, and so altogether lovely that creatures all essay to love his loveliness...
— Meister Eckhart

The first week of the Easter Season is known as the Octave of Easter and holds many musical and universal reminders including ones of love. Below is a little collection put together with love for the sake of the Love connecting us all - especially in this season.

Excerpts from two poems by an ol' beloved minister:

...GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins



Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens
with a love like that—
It lights the whole world.
— Hafez

(Photo thanx to the consistent eye for beauty of Akhtar Wasim Dar)

"We don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sometimes Love means Pain - here's a completely new perspective to me:
“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.”
— Kenji Miyazawa

THE WAVE

As when far off in the middle of the ocean
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface, then rolling on
Gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks
With a prodigious roar, and what was deep
Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls
Of sunken sand and living things and water —
So in the springtime every race of people
And all the creatures on earth or in the water,
Wild animals and flocks and all the birds
In all their painted colors, all rush to charge
Into the fire that burns them: love moves them all.
Virgil (translated by Robert Pinsky; The Threepenny Review)


Since my tradition of Easter celebrates SOMEONE once "into" Loaves and Fishes, I submit this final piece here most humbly as a goal for practical LOVE - although I have so much to learn about this practice...

Loaves and Fishes

This is not
the age of information.

This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

-- David Whyte


Steve Livingstone's blog "Stereo Man"

The Generosity of Easter
“Give so you have no regrets.” All year long, I’ve been contemplating this statement...attributed to Joseph Goldstein...Don’t give so much you can’t pay your bills and cause yourself all kinds of suffering, including resentment. Don’t give so little you suffer remorse later... Tracy in Parabola magazine

You are such an ocean of Love,
That you have no boundary.
The desire man and woman
Feel for each other,
Is only a drop from that ocean.
-Mevlana ( from a Divan was translated by the late Turkish scholar Golpinarli)

Other Rumi excerpts:

The bird of vision is flying towards You with the wings of desire...

...God is working everywhere his massive Resurrection;
How can we pretend to act on our own?
In the hand of Love I am like a cat in a sack;
Sometimes Love hoists me into the air,
Sometimes Love flings me into the air,
Love swings me round and round His head;
...The lovers of God have fallen in a furious river;
They have surrendered themselves to Love's commands...

Come!
...break apart
Your stony self.
The heart’s matrix
is glutted with rubies.
Springs of laughter
are buried in your breast.
...Batter down the door
to the treasury
...The water in your jug
is brackish and low.
Smash the jug
and come to the river!
-Jalaluddin Rumi
Rumi: The Light of Life

As a most connecting magazine and spiritual feast: PARAB0LA highlighted recently: "Love is that which unites self and other while maintaining the integrity of each."

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For any here who want to follow the human rights updates such as "Weaving a Web of Accountability" Arar v. Ashcroft (Update on the Maher Arar Petition from Center for Constitutional Rights) and more, plz go to nomorecrusades dot blogspot dot com
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May each and all who come here Go in Peace, Love and Patience including with self opening to Self...