us

Hallmark’s latest ad says: “Valentine’s Day is not for saying I love you, it’s for saying I love us. I love who we are together, how we’ve grown from our first nervous conversations to the us we have become.”
And so I celebrate us: all the wonderful relationships that bring so much joy: all the brothers and sisters, parents and children, friends and neighbors, as well as the lovers… thank-you!

the beginning and the end

"It is love that fashions us into the fullness of our being--not our looks, not our work, not our wants, not our achievements, not our parents, not our status, not our dreams. These all are the fodder and the filler, the navigating fuels of our lives; but it is love: who we love, how we love, why we love, and that we love which ultimately shapes us. It is love, before all and after all, in the beginning and in the end, that creates us."
Daphne Rose Kingma

forgiving

"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit."
Peter Ustinov

"It has been said that the continuation of the species is due to man being forgiving."
The Mahabharata

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been different.

Love... keeps no record of wrongs.

loving the children

“Loving our children means honoring their identities. It means believing that they are individuals in the process of becoming, who have talents and abilities that may exceed in scope and dimension the powers we ourselves possess. Loving our children means that rather than squashing these miraculous gifts we will stand in reverence of them, and at such a distance as to give them air and light enough to blossom.”
Daphne Rose Kingma

visibility

“The person who loves you will see you—not just how you look, but who you are inside, what makes you joyfully happy, what prickles your heart, what, in private, your dreams are made of.
“Because the person who loves you sees you, you can reveal yourself even more. Because he sees your great kindness, you can show him the scars; because she sees your pure heart, you can show her the frailties you try to protect and obscure.
“Seeing is receiving. To see another human being is to take him or her in completely, through the windows of your eyes, to the chambers of your heart and the castle in your soul.”
Daphne Rose Kingma

response

“Love is response, the answering back with your body, your mind, your words, your kisses, your touches, and your looks to the joy, delight, anguish, heartache, good fortune, curiosity, achievement, disappointment, and exaltation of the person you love. Response is the echo of one soul to another, the endlessly outwardly rippling circles that what has been felt, said, done, or left undone by your beloved has been made real to you by your response.”
Daphne Rose Kingma

tireless

“Who travels for love finds a thousand miles not longer than one.”
Japanese proverb