Practical Love

  After my Dad had his first stroke, he came home a different man . It was very scary in the hospital. I know my Mom was wondering if she was going to be taking home the equivalent of a baby when this was all done. Her sister, my aunt, was taking care of her husband after a stroke and he was wheelchair bound and very hard to understand. Was this going to be her life too? But he didn't turn out that way. He could walk and talk and lead a very normal life. What happened next was surprising. He started to become effusive. He kept complimenting my Mom and telling her he loved her. He really started to do that with everyone. Now you might think that this was because of a near death experience and he was feeling lucky. It might have been. You hear that happens with a lot of NDEs. I just finished watching an episode of "Castle" on ABC. The show was centered around the premise that the main character had gone to an alternate reality where his girlfriend didn't know hi

I had an observation today. After all this blog is about observing Love in the world and reporting it so we can practice it. You can disagree, as I have stated in the last post, I am no expert on Love. But, with practice, we can all be better at it. My observation is this: All people want to feel beautiful, loved and young. All marketing seems to point to these three pillars. Some people equate beauty with youth but they are far from being the same. Why is it that if a hundred people tell us that we are beautiful and one person tells us we are ugly that we believe the one and not the hundred? I have taken a number of arts and humanities classes and learned the same thing from every class. There is no ugly. God made all things. God knows no ugly. Everything is formed out of Love because God is Love. In the same vane, an artist creates art and that art is created out of love even if it is an expression of angst. I don't want to get into a discussion about art except to say tha

I guess it has been a long time since I wrote in this blog. I guess it is because I don't find myself an expert in this arena. I never set out to be an expert, but reading my posts, I found that I was giving more advice than observation. Love is not something you can be an expert in, but some are better than others. I also find that I have more loving intentions sometimes than loving practice. Practical Love is about the every day practice of love. We are only taught by example how to love. I find the words of experts, the bible and other sources to be confusing at times. I think we can ponder the words and what they mean for so long that we can make them mean whatever we want. "Turn the other cheek..." Matthew 5:39, for example, is not the advice that I necessarily want to give my 13 year old when dealing with bullies in middle school. Learning and teaching Love is a challenge. Practicing Love every day is like a battle of wills within yourself. How do we stand up