To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
Interpretation
Love involves both accepting change and navigating through various phases in a relationship.
This quote highlights the dual nature of love, where one must be open to numerous beginnings and endings within the same relationship. Love is not static; it requires the ability to adapt and persevere through challenges while also celebrating new beginnings and transformations.
In practice
During a wedding ceremony as a reflection on the couple's journey.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
That is what the intuition is for: it is the direct messenger of the soul.
No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
My mind's sunk so low, Claudia, because of you, wrecked itself on your account so bad already, that I couldn't like you if you were the best of women, -or stop loving you, no matter what you do.
We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Whatever our religion, we know that if we really want to love, we must first learn to forgive before anything else.
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