Bob Marley was right.

If you would be loved, love and be lovable.
--Benjamin Franklin

We all desire to be loved. Our common human characteristic is our need to count in someone else's life. At least one other person needs us, we tell ourselves, when we feel least able to accept life's demands. How alike we all are. The paradox is that our own need for love is lessened when we bestow it on others. Give it away and it returns. A promise, one we can trust.

The reality about love and its path from sender to receiver and back again is often distant from our minds. More often we stew and become obsessed with the lack of love's evidence in our lives. Why isn't he smiling? Why didn't she care? Has someone more interesting taken our place? Choosing to offer love, rather than to look for it, will influence every experience we have. Life will feel gentler, and the rewards will be many and far reaching.

Loving others promises me the love I desire. But I can't expect it if I don't give it first.

breaking free a bit

I spent a week in Chicago learning about economics, journalism, and a free society. Met policy analysts from DC think tanks, and journalists who both love and hate the city. One writes about religion and being a mother, and another writes about the militarization of the police force and all the unethical "isolated incidents" that somehow turn into them getting praised for their bravery when they should have been fired. 

6-7 hours of lectures each day was like drinking water out of a fire hose. But the most stimulating week of the year! Each night was topped off with a lovely open bar (where i was forced to learn to love beer, yes, I love a couple varieties of beer now) which made for very stimulating conversations, and the hilarious comedians finally came out of their shells too.   

Met a guy who strongly resembles Jonathan Rhys Meyers, is atheist, and has a mind for centuries. Its funny the things that make you feel like family. I always assumed this ensued with individuals who share my faith in the Catholic Church, which is true. But something else does it. The desire for truth. Even if they are at another point in their path, the fiery desire to get to the essence of justice and proper order as individuals and as a society, is totally unifying. I miss them all already. Justin and I made a trip to the beach and laid out one day. We spent three hours in the art museum and saw just about any artist you can name, and multiple pieces by each. I wish i took more pictures.

A small group of us, mostly the people who put on the seminar, went on a river boat cruise narrated by a fellow who knows the ins and outs of the architectural sights along the way. Beautiful. We stumbled off the boat bedazzled on wine, and let Radley (who writes for the Huff post) do what he does best - investigate. But this time for the prime dinner destination. Victory. We landed at the Purple Pig. I was reborn. Pork shoulder, pig tail, and bone marrow. I think i had a serious animal deficit in my diet, because it knocked me off my chair. 

I got back to Seattle and immediately packed up my stuff and moved into a room about 45 minutes north of where I was (and 10 minutes to work), into a friend's home on Mercer Island. I am subletting a room there until I find out where I want to live. I felt like Chicago put that intrepid nature (as Meags calls it :)) back in me and I couldn't take another moment in my parent's home. Something too comfortable about it. The family dynamics and the all too familiar "dont take risks" worldview they live under is anesthetizing.  The house I moved into is not comfortable enough for me to want to stay, so the fire is under my ass a-blazing. 

And I almost didn't even go to Chicago.

Happy Wednesday :)

It gets good about a minute in.... gosh I love 4 day work weeks!!

http://soundcloud.com/deejaysoundpower/shakira-feat-lil-wayne-timbaland-give-it-up-to-me-dj-sound-power-remix

Awakening the senses!

I woke up this morning with an indescribable desire to book a one way ticket to Spain or France. This was influenced by a plethora of things: my friend just landed in France where she starts her aupair summer job North of Paris (Mary Ellen - you met her) ; Sean's wife Anna is from Spain, and she is one of the happiest/festive people I have ever met (Joy keeps you young. She is a mum of 4 and looks 19), Sean and Anna are traveling Europe for their ten year anniversary and their pics showed up on my feed this morning; and perhaps the still yet to be scheduled trip to South Florida, where everyone is tan and socializes like its their profession. So I put on brighter colors than normal today and have been listening to Ottmar Liebert all day in the office, and happy to acknowledge that there is nothing restraining me from actually giving either posh destination a visit. While I see many friends getting hitched behind their white picket fences (which, mind you, I cant wait for), I am grateful that I have an insatiable curiosity to experience the colorful, disarmingly beautiful cites and sounds available to me the moment I decide to get out of my own way - i don't plan on waiting for my ten year wedding anniversary.

Spain

 

Monaco, France

Reminder to Me

The most important hour is always the present; the most significant person is precisely the one who is sitting across from you right now; the most necessary work is always love. 

-Meister Eckhart 

Anticipation

How funny is it to just stop for a minute and realize where you are in life. How you got there. How incredible it is. How strange that you have come all the way you have to get where you are. How blessed we all are to be at whatever point we are.

Then to lift your thoughts a bit down the road ahead; to where your dreams lead you.

My thoughts this morning? I am so excited for my future sweet little babies! Little carbon copies of me and my love to put in striped hanna andersson long-johns and chase around. with bare feet. on wood floors. in the mornings before breakfast.

A weirdly specific picture to have in my head, I know. I came across these and that is what they told me :)

 Love you ladies!!

Prayer & Hope

"33. Saint Augustine, in a homily on the First Letter of John, describes very beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope. He defines prayer as an exercise of desire. Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched. “By delaying [his gift], God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases its capacity [for receiving him]”. Augustine refers to Saint Paul, who speaks of himself as straining forward to the things that are to come (cf. Phil 3:13). He then uses a very beautiful image to describe this process of enlargement and preparation of the human heart. “Suppose that God wishes to fill you with honey [a symbol of God's tenderness and goodness]; but if you are full of vinegar, where will you put the honey?” The vessel, that is your heart, must first be enlarged and then cleansed, freed from the vinegar and its taste. This requires hard work and is painful, but in this way alone do we become suited to that for which we are destined[26]. Even if Augustine speaks directly only of our capacity for God, it is nevertheless clear that through this effort by which we are freed from vinegar and the taste of vinegar, not only are we made free for God, but we also become open to others. It is only by becoming children of God, that we can be with our common Father. To pray is not to step outside history and withdraw to our own private corner of happiness. When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we desire at this moment—that meagre, misplaced hope that leads us away from God. We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes. We must free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves. God sees through them, and when we come before God, we too are forced to recognize them. “But who can discern his errors? Clear me from hidden faults” prays the Psalmist (Ps 19:12 [18:13]). Failure to recognize my guilt, the illusion of my innocence, does not justify me and does not save me, because I am culpable for the numbness of my conscience and my incapacity to recognize the evil in me for what it is. If God does not exist, perhaps I have to seek refuge in these lies, because there is no one who can forgive me; no one who is the true criterion. Yet my encounter with God awakens my conscience in such a way that it no longer aims at self-justification, and is no longer a mere reflection of me and those of my contemporaries who shape my thinking, but it becomes a capacity for listening to the Good itself."

And here is this link to the encyclical online in case you care to read more: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html