Tin Wedding Whistle

Though you know it anyhow
Listen to me, darling, now,
Proving what I need not prove
How I know I love you, love.
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren't.
Far and wide, far and wide,
I can walk with you beside;
Furthermore, I tell you what,
I sit and sulk where you are not.
Visitors remark my frown
Where you're upstairs and I am down,
Yes, and I'm afraid I pout
When I'm indoors and you are out;
But how contentedly I view
Any room containing you.
In fact I care not where you be,
Just as long as it's with me.
In all your absences I glimpse
Fire and flood and trolls and imps.
Is your train a minute slothful?
I goad the stationmaster wrothful.
When with friends to bridge you drive
I never know if you're alive,
And when you linger late in shops
I long to telephone the cops.
Yet how worth the waiting for,
To see you coming through the door.
Somehow, I can be complacent
Never but with you adjacent.
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren't.
Then grudge me not my fond endeavor,
To hold you in my sight forever;

Let none, not even you, disparage
Such a valid reason for a marriage.

--Ogden Nash

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

From Robert Johnson's "We"

In Robert Johnson’s We, he adds that many years ago a wise friend gave him the name for human love.  She called it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love.  Within this phrase, if we humble ourselves enough to look, is the very essence of what human love is, and it shows us the principle differences between human love and romance.  Stirring the oatmeal is a humble act—not exciting or thrilling.  But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth.  It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple tasks:  earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night.  To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity to everything.  Like the rice hulling of the Zen monks, the spinning wheel of Ghandi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the middle of the humble and ordinary.

Loving You is a Way of Being

:

Loving you is a way of being.

I watch the years pass like the smoke

That goes rising in blues, and is lost.

Life has an identical profile

That reappears sometimes, and is its constant always.

I have the profile of loving you forever.

I have assumed that gesture from the beginning.

It seems that I have come to this corner of the world

To tell the universe I love you.

Occasionally the world exists to contain us:

A transient vessel that holds

Our contents.

It is a way of being: loving you is that.

An attitude toward life;

Almost a life in itself, an absolute.

A circle, of which each point is the end

And each point the beginning.

The plenitude of being rests in your embrace,

Like coming close to quiet.

And being quiet is your way.

Complete am I only when loving you.

     --Angel Cuadra