Thoughts on Love

I'm a bit of a reader.  Not voracious exactly, but there are usually a few things on the nightstand by the bed.

Sometimes I read well-regarded literature.  Sometimes, I even read it successfully.  But other times not so much.  I've been stuck on the same page of Ulysses now for the better part of a decade.  Every time I pick it back up I can't remember where I left off - maybe I just don't drink enough to understand Joyce.

Other times, my choice of literature leans more toward the unusual or the technical.  At the moment, The Art of the Catapult is sharing space on the nightstand with a book on how to conduct paranormal investigations and a hand-held device for measuring electromagnetic fields.  I had an awesome Christmas and my family knows my tastes well.

Within the last year, I've read quite a number of books that could be characterized as either philosophical in nature or relating in some way to comparative religious studies - or some measure of both.  I enjoy these books, as they often make me think about the world, and our place in it, in ways I hadn't before. 

One relatively thick volume that I've been reading lately is an Osho commentary on The Sutra of 42 Chapters - a Buddhist manuscript dating to the first century.  Although I studied philosophy in college, my studies were limited solely to works of Western authors.  The thought reflected in this work is, as they say, an entirely new breed of cat.  Or, well, they would say that if the particular cat wasn't actually many millennia in the making.

One aspect of the work that I find especially intriguing is the concept of love.  Osho suggests that just as we can dance without being observed, and we can sing without someone listening, we can love without an object of that exercise.  In Osho's view, love is internal.  And only by cultivating love within ourselves can we share love with others.  If we try to share love without first developing it within ourselves, we share instead our misery and our suffering. 

Powerful thoughts.  I suspect the Echidna would approve.

Love is a funny thing.  It can lead you to do things that you might not otherwise do.  Like, for example, knitting a highly cabled lap blanket. 

This one took me the better part of a month.  The pattern is Serenity by Laura Wilson-Martos.  The yarn is Lion Brand Wool-Ease - recycled from a friend's abandoned project. 

The recipient is a lady I've known my entire life.  She is goofy, with a quirky sense of humor, a talent for beating me soundly in Scrabble, and a penchant for calling me every year on May 29 and singing when I pick up the phone.  I love her dearly.   She is my mom.

~TSMK