Knitting
Knitting is love, looped and warm.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, Yarn Harlot, p. xiii
Category: Love
10 Posts
Focusing on Possibility
Lovers always focus away from negativity, to beauty, goodness, and joy. Though they are aware of the dark side of life, they avoid gravitating to it. Obsession with what is wrong with the world assures our blindness to what is good and right. On the other hand, solutions become more visible in the light of possibilities.
Beauty and goodness are successful forces against ugliness and evil. Negative people look for (and always find) confirmation for the negative, just as positive people look for and find the lightness of being. Both exist. Both are real and are always with us. The difference is as basic as a decision, and as simple as opening our eyes.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 225
Redemption
Love means the ability to identify with imperfection and to recognize the inadequacies, weaknesses, fears and confusion in ourselves and others. Loving what is unlovable in them is always a challenge. It’s so much easier to dismiss people for their failings than it is to stick by them. I wonder why it is that we are more prone to finding fatal flaws than looking for redeeming qualities?
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 217
Victor or Victim
Loss of love is always devastating, but it can also be a time for airing out stuffy inner rooms, reassessing values, starting anew. Relationships may become stagnant or wither and die, but life and love continue.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 204
The Same Clear Message
God speaks to us in a thousand voices, each with the same clear message: “I love you. Please trust me on this one.”
— Hugh Prather, Spiritual Notes to Myself, p. 7
Not an Endurance Test
It is a sorry and often heard refrain that “love has vanished from our relationship.” As with many such statements, this is unfair to love. It’s not love that has disappeared from the relationship, we have. Lasting love is not a test of endurance. When we are able to appreciate all the little things which brought us together, and deepen that appreciation over the years, we stay together. Such a relationship is one of life’s great success stories.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 181
Love is a Decision
I’ve learned that love is a decision, renewable every day. Every minute, sometimes!
— Debbie Macomber, Knit Together, p. 111
A Simple Lesson in Loving
Approach everyone you meet as an individual with dignity and a life as complicated and mysterious as your own. Discard preceonceptions and suspend, even for a moment, the idea that you “know this type.”
Do these things and perhaps you might learn the most important lesson that love can teach us: that each person is worthy of our love simply because they are human, one of God’s unique creations, and begin from there.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 179
Free from the Past
When we realize that we are responsible for freeing ourselves from the yokes of the past, we will also free everyone else of this responsibility. Only then can we begin to concentrate more on loving and less on blaming.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 178
Compassion
When we are compassionate, we become more realistic in our expectations, less demanding, and more flexible. We are less likely to inflict wounds, hurt feelings, and indulge in recriminations…. When we make the compassionate choice, we enhance the dignity of each individual, which is the very essence of loving them.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 176