Marianne Hill – Healing The Shadow Practitioner and Trainer

Some poems and quotes exploring love.

I do hope that something here will speak to you as you navigate your way through the Christmas season – whatever challenges and joys it may bring.

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‘The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.’
~Thomas Merton~

‘Someone who does not run
towards the allure of love walks
a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here senses
the love-hawk floating above
and waits and will not be driven
or scared to safety’
~Rumi~

‘People need love the most when they least deserve it.’
~Anon~

‘The distance from your pain, your grief, your unattended wounds, is the distance from your partner.’
~Stephen Levine~

‘It was easy to love God in all that was beautiful.
The lesson of deeper knowledge, though, instructed me to love God in all things.’
~St. Francis Of Assisi~

‘And think not you can direct the course of love,
for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
….but, if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing floor,
Into a seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.’
~Kahil Gibran~

‘The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.

How do they learn that?
They fall, and falling
they’re given wings.’
~Rumi~

‘Only love honours God.
That sounds as if it could be true.
But surely everything he made must be perfect.’
~St. Francis Of Assisi~

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?’  ~Hafiz~

‘….And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself,
and to one another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection,
even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,
even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.’
~Kahil Gibran~

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
~James Baldwin~

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