Status Updates From Why We Need Love: Eye-Openi...

I’m blown away by Krishnamurti’s talk on love: our thoughts wear patterns in our mind and block flexible thought - we have to be aware of our ways of thinking. Selfish love about possession isn’t love at all. We can’t experience love if we seek it out, and everything we think about love is wrong, because it doesn’t come from the conscious ego and isn’t about thought or the mind at all.

On the James Joyce fiction — a powerful tale of how fear disguised as morality/propriety can hurt. It hits a little close to home when you see your own tendency of withdrawn-ness leading someone else to such loneliness and regret. I don’t want to be "outcast from life’s feast" either.

Really enjoyed the objective overview of human mating behavior — sheds light on all the ways we romanticize/fetishize the act of sex itself. Also glad to see a Brontë quote!!

Finished the Miller’s part in the Canterbury Tales — good heavens, I’m scarred for life but also entertained beyond measure. That was hilarious.

A surprisingly not-too-structurally unsound e.e. cummings poem; it’s beautiful in its fragility and recurring metaphors. Romeo and Juliet seems much less creepy when framed in this context.

Whoof, John Donne is a little out there but I think I get it! He writes really sweet love poems for a metaphysical dude.

Paul reminds me a lot of Madame Bovary — both have an insatiable, ridiculous desire for the finer things in life that makes it hard to sympathize with them. They think money is what’ll make them happy. But while she is fueled by greed and ennui, he’s clearly suffering with anxiety and daddy issues. I feel for him much more — he really does, in fact, need love.

Forget Hafiz; his poems gutted ME like a fish.

I actually really enjoyed the image of the Virgin Mary and Jesus - reflected on that in my morning prayer. Interesting how the painting portrays love as intrinsic to Christian religion, while the Arnold poem sees love as the only thing left without religion. Must mean it exists for all cultures and peoples regardless of background or creed.

So far the poems/quotes have encompassed lots of facets of love - foolish love, perspective-limited love, predatory love, sacrificial love. I especially liked William Blake’s "The Clod and the Pebble." The book is really revealing to me just how intrinsic love is to our world - we show that we love each other so often in so many ways.

People in the reviews keep trashing "Silas Marner," but I think it had more relevance than they were saying. The disregard which the church and his friend had shown him and that which the real father had shown the girl did sort of bind them together as kindred "lone things" as he says. Giving TLC to a child can make you more mindful of giving that TLC back to yourself.

I know, ha-ha, Valentine’s Day rolls around and here I am suddenly reading this. The intimacy that the author is going for hits on the first page though - "The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." Made me consider how yearnings manifest themselves in different ways, and how healing the body doesn’t equal healing the mind or soul.