Happy Birthday Sam!
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Love
41 years ago today, the sweetest, sexiest, most marvelous person in the universe was born. I have no idea why I’ve been blessed by his presence in my life, but I hope it never ends.
Tags: birthday, Love, Sam Chupp
TotD: Emma Goldman on Love
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Love, Relationships, Thought of the Day
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” Anarchism and Other Essays (1911)
Tags: Emma Goldman, free love, Love, marriage
TotD: Carter Heyward on Love
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Relationships, Thought of the Day
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.
For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called “love.” Love is a choice–not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity–a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.
Tags: Carter Heyward, justice, Love
Diane Duane Rocks
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Blogging, College, CYLC, Love, Reading, Spirituality
Back when the Meisha Merlin warehouse was being cleaned out, Sam picked up a copy of The Sword and the Dragon, first volume of the Epic Tales of the Five by Diane Duane that MM put out. It contains The Door Into Fire and The Door Into Shadow.
I’ve wanted my own copies of the first three Tales of the Five books for decades, since reading an old friend’s copies. I’m still disappointed that MM never put out the next volume, which should have included The Door Into Sunset and the never-before-published The Door Into Starlight. But then, there are other people who have far more reason to be disappointed about MM matters than I do, so I can’t fuss too much. And I have this volume, and will continue to hold out hope that Duane will find a new publisher who will bring out the others sometime in my lifetime.
Anyway, I had to stop reading to show this bit to Sam. It sums up much of what I love about Duane’s philosophy.
…death is inevitable. But we have one power, as men and beasts and creatures of other planes. We can slow down the Death, we can die hard, and help all the worlds die hard. To live with vigor, to love powerfully and without caring whether we’re loved back, to let loose building and teaching and healing and all the arts that try to slow down the great Death. Especially joy, just joy itself. A joy flares bright and goes out like the stars that fall, but the little flare it makes slows down the great Death ever so slightly. That’s a triumph, that it can be slowed down at all, and by such a simple thing.
Tags: death, Diane Duane, entropy, Epic Tales of the Five, GLBT, joy, Love, Middle Kingdoms, polyamory
And That’s the Week
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Family, Health, Home, Love
I consider Sunday the first day of the week, rather than the last.
It was a week full of appointments for the girl, and getting paperwork shuffled to various bureaucracies. Sam and I had lovely dates Wednesday and tonight, although both of us were so exhausted Wednesday that we turned in much earlier than usual.
Tags: aggravation, chronic illness, doctors, health care, Katie, Love, medications, migraines, prescriptions, Rant, Sam
TotD: Written On the Body
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Reading, Relationships, Thought of the Day
I’d never heard of Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (or of the author, at all) until I was browsing through some of the quotations at Gaia1 a while back. This bit is too long for my quotations file, but I love it too much to just delete it.
“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it’s The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? I’ve thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you’re not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you? Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Do the dead find peace beyond the rattle of the world? What peace is there for us whose best love cannot return them even for a day? I raise my head to the door and think I will see you in the frame. I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word is yours. The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
After reading about the book, I was surprised to find that it isn’t about the obvious sort of loss. The novel is described as an erotic homage to a lover’s body, but one of the intriguing aspect is that the author never gives the narrator a gender. I’m going to try to find it to give it a read.
1 Yes, I’m TechnoMom there, like most places.
Tags: grief, Jeanette Winterson, loss, Love, pain, TotD, Written on the Body
Sam and Saturday
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Family, Fun, Home, Love, Parenting, Relationships
Yes, it was another date night. Yay! (They are the highlights of my week, with good reason.) The girl went out on a date, so we had the house to ourselves.
It still feels odd, at times, not to have any kids around, and not to even be worried about picking them up. We like the young man she’s dating, so we feel fairly good about her being out with him, and don’t get very nervous. Still, there’s a certain level of awareness that never seems to go away when you can’t personally verify your child’s immediate wellbeing.
In any case, it was a lovely evening. I do love my Sam, and he never does stop spoiling me.
Tags: date night, Katie, Love, Sam
Pirates!
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Fun, Love, RPGs
Not the nice, Johnny Depp kind, no. The pillage/rape/murder sort, spiced up with demon-worshipping shark people.
Tonight was date night, and I was impatient to be back to our game. We’d left off at a very unresolved point the last time we played, before the weekend. It would be almost impossible for someone else to enter that game at this point, so we played other things while Hope was visiting. I didn’t mind, but when you’re in the middle of sneaking in to a pirate kingdom warded by psionic killers, you really, really want to know if you’ll make it out again!
Katie went out with her beau and friends, and Sam brought dinner home. He had to run errands before coming home, which we try to avoid on Wednesday nights, especially, but sometimes it happens.
Warning: Gaming recap next. Skip if you hate such things.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: CoraNi, Katie, Love, pirates, psionics, Sam, Seauclaire, sharkpeople, spies
Hump Day For You, Date Night For Us
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Love, Relationships
It’s amazing how much a mid-week date can cheer you up! I do recommend regularly scheduled dates to anyone who has a significant other or others. Especially if you have kids!
The girl went out, as usual. She surprised us by coming home early. Not a problem, just unexpected. She’s gotten into the habit of knocking on the front door and waiting for a response before she walks in, to avoid seeing anything she might not want to see 😉 Smart girl!
Tags: date night, Katie, Love, Sam
Semester done!
Posted by Cyn | Filed under College, Fun, Geekery, Music, RPGs
I took my project management final tonight, so I’m done with the semester! Now I’m trying to download the textbook files for next semester, but the ebook server is having Issues.
In the meantime, I’m listening to some lovely new music, free and legal, over at TheSixtyOne. I don’t know how Sam found out about the place, but it’s neat.
Tags: brother-in-law, ebook server, Gaming, Love, Music, Sam