love

Morning cuddles

*****************

Thursday Challenge

Next Week: TWO (People, Animals, Flowers, Pillows, Candles, Buildings,...)

classic poem #5

A Birthday

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

classic poem #9

How Do I Love Thee

Sonnets from the Portuguese

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.


Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

how do you hear "I love you"?

(Photo: Couldn't resist all the hearts last strawberry season.)

Happy Valentine's Day!

What does it take to get you to hear "I love you"?

- Help with baby or the dishes?

- Chocolates and roses?

- A heartfelt compliment?

- A dinner for two where you linger over coffee and conversation?

- Kisses, hugs and lots of cuddles?

Chances are you'd like some of them all. But if Gary Chapman is right, each one of us has a predominant love language.

This Valentine's Day why not review his description of the five love languages: service, gifts, affirmation, quality time and physical touch. Then say "I love you" in a way your significant other won't be able to miss.

• Take the 30-second love language assessment here.

• The love languages and their relationship to marriage are described briefly here and here.

• Of course Dr. Chapman talks about them in much more detail within the love language books he's written:

- The Five Love Languages
- The Five Love Languages of Teens
- The Five Love Languages of Children

• In case this day finds you in a spot where you and your love need to resolve some issues, check out the Five Languages of Apology. Good, good stuff.

do grand-dogs count?

I haven't owned a dog for many years. In fact, I've only ever owned one. It was when I was a teacher in the northern BC community of Hazelton many years ago. The summer between the two years I taught there a friend's dog had a litter of puppies. I volunteered to adopt one of these mongrels and at about six weeks old I took one home and named him Ruggles.

He was ever so cute as a pup and I loved him to pieces. He lived with us (another teacher and me) for the year and soon grew out of puppyhood, to become a smiling, exuberant and very disobedient dog (I had about as much success training him to sit, come and stay as I had in keeping a quiet, controlled classroom).

When I went home to the farm in Saskatchewan that summer, I took him with me. There he joined at least two other dogs -- old farm dog Toby, a stocky, black shorted-haired don't-know-the-breed, and my brother's red Irish setter Penny. I'm afraid Ruggles was at the bottom of the pecking order and not a welcome addition. Very soon he took to roaming.

He stayed at the farm when I left for Europe in August of that year. In October I picked up my mail from an American Express office and remember reading the letter from home in a Bern, Switzerland coffee shop. It not only delivered the news that my dad had been diagnosed with cancer but also that Ruggles had gone missing. They thought he had probably been mistaken by a neighboring farmer for a chicken-raiding coyote -- and you know what becomes of chicken-raiding coyotes. What a depressing day!



I've never owned another dog since then and neither have we had one as a family pet. The closest we've come is lately with our grand-dog Rupert. The kids bring him over when they come from Kamloops and we babysit him when they go out to visit friends. He is a beautiful black Lab, now a little over a year old and pretty well full-grown. However, he thinks he's still a puppy and is always trying to get up on our laps to cuddle. He enjoys the taste of body butter, loves new doggy toys and having his tummy rubbed.

For lots more doggy tales and information on how you can add yours to the "Dog Days of February" collection, go to Rebecca Writes who is featuring all things canine this month.

God-currents

Take joy wherever you go. You have been much blessed. You are being much blessed.

Such stores of blessing are awaiting you in the months and years that lie ahead. Pass every blessing on.

Love can and does go round the world, passed on the God-current from one to the other.

Shed a little sunshine in the heart of one, that one is cheered to pass it on, and so My vitalizing joy-giving message goes.

Be transmitters these days. Love and Laugh. Cheer all. Love all.

Always seek to understand others and you cannot fail to love them.

See Me in the dull, the uninteresting, the sinful, the critical, the miserable.

See Me in the laughter of children and the sweetness of old age, in the courage of youth and the patience of man- and womanhood.

from God Calling by Two Listeners - edited by A. J. Russell

***************

Remembering

A year ago today Mom died. I miss the sunshine she lavished on me, and her zest for life. Still sometimes in the half-awake state of early morning, I can't believe I'll never speak to her on earth again. Something in me calls out, 'It's been long enough. I need to talk to her, be wrapped in her soft hug, look into her kind brown eyes, share a laugh with her...'

Photo: Butterfly on Goldenrod

a beach story

We took the day off Monday and went with our friends J. and M. to Harrison Lake (the lake with the sand castle competitions.) To have our picnic we found a small shady spot between two paths just big enough for the four of us (on the panorama it’s just beyond the bluff of trees on the right). M. unpacked her fancy cigarette-lighter-plug-in cooler with its pita breads, cold cuts, cheese, eggplant dip, salad, dressing and cold drinks, and we feasted.

We were passing around the second course -- yellow plums and pecan chip cookies -- and about to make tea when a man with a couple of little kids in tow plunked his blanket and some picnic things onto the tiny patch of shaded grass right beside us, at the same time flashing us a smile, as if to say, ‘I’m sure you won’t mind.’

While the kids buzzed around the things he’d left – he having gone for more we guessed – we discussed that surely he and his gang were only using our bit of grass as a staging place to collect their things before going on to find their own shady spot.

But no. It soon became obvious that this group was fully intending to share that shady spot with us, no matter that it would necessarily be cheek by jowl. And it soon also became perfectly obvious that they were not only a handful. More and more came to join them, their numbers swelling from four to maybe fifteen adults, teens and kids. Their spread-out blankets practically touched our chairs and they jabbered and laughed while the kids ran back and forth to and from the water. The original man connected his portable barbeque to a little propane tank and was soon roasting wieners, chicken and hamburger patties and the lot of them were milling around with buns and ketchup and mustard and mayo.

All the while the four of us sat there trying to carry on our conversation but hardly able to ignore the bustle right beside us and also hardly able to hide our scowls. How dare they just come in and invade ‘our’ tiny space like that!

As time wore on, the tension eased somewhat. I’m sure they sensed our disapproval as they glanced over from time to time. Once one of the Mamas asked us to keep an eye on their things and we said, yes, of course we would.

But this was not a great way to spend a relaxing afternoon. And though I, for one, was tempted to hang out there indefinitely to make the point that moving in on people was not the way to go about getting a picnic site, the need to do something on this beautiful day, plus the shrinking of our own bit of shade as the afternon wore on, soon had M. and me leaving to explore the shops. About twenty minutes later we bumped into the guys as we exited an antique shop. They too had tired of the scene and packed everything into the car. Of course the minute they’d left, the other party had moved in!

So what was that all about?

Rudeness on their part, and selfishness on ours?

Or perhaps it was a cultural clash. Because these people were of a different race, obvious by the color of their skin and the way some of them chattered in their mother tongue or in heavily accented English. Maybe they were simply accustomed to living in crowded conditions and weren’t even aware that we home-born Canadians like lots of room and don’t take kindly to our space being invaded.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t shake the thought, as the day wore on, that here we had also missed an opportunity. We could have been more welcoming, perhaps struck up a bit of a conversation, even just demonstrated by our body language and facial expressions hospitality, generosity, compassion and love. All four of us call ourselves Christians. We could have shown that we've been with Jesus.

There is a test question I sometimes ask myself when tempted to behave badly toward people. It is, 'What if I run into these people again, say in my neighborhood or in church? Will I regret anything I did or said?' I didn't think of that yesterday, until it was too late.

Perhaps if I’d really paid attention to this segment from Monday morning's reading in Streams in the Desert, I’d have done better:

“In the present day there are those who live intermittent Christian lives because they have become occupied with the outward, and center in circumstances in place of centering in God. God wants us more and more to see Him in everything, and to call nothing small...” C.H.P.