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My advice to you is as follows:
one, learn meditation practice;
two, empower yourself with your own emotions -
don't be afraid of grief, or heartthrob;
three, be willing to expose yourself and be a fool,
to not be intimidated in the presence of presidents
and rock stars, but come on as a gentle, living
flesh and blood human being.
Don't treat people as icons.
If what you are doing is considered by all your friends
as too far out, think thrice -
so you don't go outside the bounds of sanity -
check it out.
Get a good education in reading the Eastern and Western classics.
Avoid animal fat.
Be a slave to love.
Wear your heart on your sleeve.
Twenty rejections in a row are wiped out by one acceptance.
-- Allen Ginsberg
"Take
Love, For Instance"
How can it be desirable, that flurry of feeling that if it
continues and maintains intensity we call Love?
How perverse we are relative to our own good to have that in
our feelings that from the age of thirteen or so, younger all
the time they say, until seventy or whatever, no end to it
they say, we give over or are given into the 'divine emotion.'
Divine mix of anxiety, insecurity, longing that drives us
until if we are fortunate, lucky in love, we have a brief
relief that shines like fulfilment.
The constant fool's miracle, like fool's gold, but inherent;
an inherent miracle. Passion brought to bear on eyes that
shine back.
And then, or somewhat later, downhill all the way.
From here to there. Remember *there*.
Caught in the clutches of a one-way ticket. Express.
We are poor.
We are poor.
There is nothing here.
And we sling our everything into the void of it, to be caught.
What is that appetite that pretends to sustenance and ends
with all the color gone from the day and no one funny anymore.
The appetite that carries veils and obscures our memory.
And can you in that moment's tender voice say No to it? How
mean to refuse it, this little miracle that does so want in.
Feel it knocking at your heart.
Poor heart.
See what followed me home.
Can I keep it?
-- Bobbie Louise Hawkins
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world -- a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring -- this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else -- but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
-- Carson McCullers, The Ballad of a Sad Cafe
You can search
the ten-fold universe and not find a single being more worthy
of loving kindness than yourself.
-- the Buddha,
in the Samutta Nikaya
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you freedom, the seven pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness.
Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon
Your substance.
Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,
as a memory to you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels
In the marred shadow
Of your gift.
-- T.E. Lawrence
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