Monday, November 30, 2009

Dearly Beloved

At the wedding, the pastor read from and expounded upon 1 Corinthians 13. Love always trusts. Always hopes. Love endures. In his exposition, the pastor treated the passage as a text for marriage counseling. “Debbie, ‘love always trusts’ means that you always look for the most loving, most positive way of interpreting Doug’s behavior. When he’s late, rather than becoming irritated and angry and possibly even jealous, think, ‘he’s probably gone to buy me flowers’”

My first thought was “How simplistic! It’s one thing to love deeply, another to make oneself into a doormat, a fool!” And then I heard my own thoughts and was ashamed. Love believes all things and is never deceived. Love hopes all things and is not put to shame. Love requires complete vulnerability all of the time, forever. Love means being willing to never harden oneself against the beloved. Love loves the beloved even when it is unclear just how to go about doing so.

Love means not – ever – scolding my mother
Love means endless patience, no matter how infuriating she is
Love means pretending to be cheerful
Love means pretending to love her

It is so much work. And it is lonely. Extremely lonely. Once cannot very well call up a friend and say “Had the worst time of it pretending to love my mother today.”

We missed the reception. My mother felt unwell. My sister and I were, for various reasons, unable to drive. We missed the reception.

My aunt called my mother and accused her of ruining every family event, of having planned to avoid the reception, of lying about her health; she said she wished my mother had never been born into their family; she said she was sick of having to put up with my mother and was finished with her.

Love means it doesn’t matter whether I am loved. It doesn’t matter whether I am happy. I don’t get to count myself. Even if no one loves me, I have to love my mother (for example).

Love means becoming an eternal wellspring for the beloved, even if/when there is no one who can or will do the same for me.

How I wish, though, that there were a shoulder somewhere in this world with my name on it!

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

a love letter

Dear Jenny Boully,

I love you. That is not true.

love, k

Dear Jenny Boully,

I love your words. No, this is not quite it.

love, k

Dear Jenny Boully,

I love the way you compose with words. I love what you compose with words. I read you and I do indeed fall in love ... only not with you. No, not with you. I fall in love with a cloudy November sky, a precise shade of blue, a pair of brown eyes. You confirm all my suspicions. Make me very uncomfortable. And I did laugh out loud last night, on the sofa, startling Cat.

When will you write again?

Longingly yours,

k

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

An invention is a new composition, configuration, device, or process

"Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t:
 Not a chance must be wasted to-day!"

"acceleration is the change in velocity over time"

"I could leave my life. I could change completely. Is it time?"

"It would be wrong. It would be wrong because the promise told would never be the promise given"

"Momentum is a conserved quantity, meaning that the total momentum of any closed system (one not affected by external forces) cannot change. This law is also true in special relativity."

"thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

"So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone.
You should say it"

"Theoretically, there will be no death, only an exchange of energy in what is likely to be another dimension"

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string. "

"holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled."

"Think you there was, or might be, such a man
As this I dream'd of?"

"This is because entropy represents the "potential for disorder" in a system"

"If I had had faith, I would have married Regine"

"The former, Chronos, refers to numeric, or chronological, time. The latter, Kairos, literally "the right or opportune moment," relates specifically to metaphysical or Divine time."

"When you said we would read this book together, I assumed you meant it"

"Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor But was a race of heaven"

"an impulse is defined as the integral of a force with respect to time."

"In winter or summer, ’twas always the same—
 You could never meet either alone."

"Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events*, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events. "

*may or may not correspond to any empirical data