“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”
– Helen Keller
Tag: love
Writer’s Quote Wednesday – Love, Hatred, Fear
It’s Your Favorite Day of the week again….Silver Threadings Writers Quote Wednesday.
http://silverthreading.com/2015/01/14/writers-quote-wednesday-dream-writing-2015-3/
Today, I quote Walter Mosley:
Mosely just described three of mankind’s strongest emotions. Together they have the capacity to build up, tear down, and cease movement. They can cause either direction or inaction. Fear is a literal stop sign. It comes with a sickle that can literally wipe out any chance of movement. It is the opposite of courage and nothing can be done without a certain level of courage. Fear also leads to Hatred. It takes a lot of energy to hate someone, and hate will eventually destroy the hater. It will eat you inside out; claw its way out of your mouth until you are nothing more than the jealousy that has consumed you. And Love. Love is a language understood by all of mankind. And as such it is stronger than hatred. Pure love is the answer to every question, the solution to every problem, and the result of every success story. Love overcomes everything because love is everything. It is for these reasons that Love, Hatred, and Fear will always have our attention in one way or the other.
About the Author:
An only child, Mosley ascribes his writing imagination to “an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies”. For $9.50 a week, Walter Mosley attended a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to a comfortable working-class west LA. He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School in 1970.
Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a “black Socrates”. His mother encouraged him to read European classics from Dickens and Zola to Camus. He also loves Langston Hughes and Gabriel García Márquez.
Mosley started writing at 34 and has written every day since, penning more than forty books and often publishing two books a year. He has written in a variety of fiction categories, including mystery and afrofuturist science fiction, as well as non-fiction politics. His work has been translated into 21 languages.
Mosley’s fame increased in 1992 when then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors. But Mosley made publishing history in 1997 by foregoing an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin’ to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black Panther Paul Coates.
His first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was the basis of a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington.
Tainted Love
It is the language of all of mankind. I can walk the streets of any Germanic town, and while I am not very familiar with the language, I can still recognize love. If a man was struggling to release himself from a burning car, I and those who see this will not hesitate to assist him. I do not need to know that hilf mir is German for help me to understand that this man needs help. It is his body language and the human side of him that speaks this to me and I am able to understand this language. I can hear the yelp of a puppy and see the movement of his body to understand that he needs help without verbally communicating with this animal. Already we are able to see that Love is an action word.
Its power transcends verbal communication. It can be seen on the street corner, in the corporate office, and in the eyes of a child. Children possess the purity of love. When they hug you there is no knife following it. There is no wicked smile behind their pupils, there is no criss cross of their fingers, and there is no deception in their hearts. I love working with children because every smile is genuine. Every “I Love You” is real. We have all experienced this kind of love at some point in our lives. But then we get older. We become grown-ups and we lose this valued possession. As a result, tainted Love is what we often see in a world as cold as this one.
People throw this word around like it is part of some volleyball game. Whoever can use their members to bounce it in another direction must surely qualify as possessing it. “I Love You” doesn’t have the same ring to it as it used to. We have taken something as pure and as genuine as love and polluted it. It is the stench of a rotting corpse; the bend of a broken bow. I dodge tainted love as if running from a plague because it is not love at all; it is hatred glossed over with the words of flattery. Tainted Love is easy to spot. Whenever it is occupied by over-zealousness it sends up a red flag. I can tell that your actions will not mimic the beauty of your words, which are quite over the top. I can see the stain of insincerity and loathing on your teeth; I can smell the dishonesty seeping from your breath. It is not patient. It is not kind. It is not enduring. It is not real. A corrupt “I Love You” stings the skin and rots the mind. It teaches men how to hate and to disguise that hatred so that it looks like love. The greatest struggle then that mankind have to look forward to in this life, is to learn how to love again.
This Little Light of Mine
“Stop cursing the darkness and light some candles.”
Brutally Honest
There’s a difference between being honest, being brutally honest and how to balance the two. Awhile back I watched a comedy called The Invention of Lying, about a man who lives in a world where everyone tells the truth. It doesn’t matter the other person’s way of thought, their perspective, or take into account their feelings, but everyone is completely and brutally honest about everything; that is until a man decides to lie for the first time and it sparks a kind of revolutionary movement among the people. It seemed that their lives had gotten better with each lie that they told; specks of grey now blossoming with the color of new life. I did not like the movie. To me it painted the picture that a world of honesty and truth is a dull and heartless world in which no one really cares to live. It made it seem like a lie every now and again could help level the amount of truth when the truth is that lies never gave life to anybody. Pleasantville is another movie similar in taste. What these movies and I think most people in general, fail to understand is that it is not lies and rebellion that is the key to this balance, it is being honest versus being brutally honest.
Brutal Honesty is called such for a reason. It is because it is the kind of words that are used to hurt and to wound. It is not that you go through life sugar coating reality or lying to people, but when you have to tell someone the truth about themselves it’s a good idea to sandwich that truth between two soft pieces of bread; it is easier to digest this way. It is not that you do not remain truthful, but you are considerate of other people’s feelings. This is the act of being kind; and also realizing that certain situations do not call for you to respond to them at all. There are so many examples in this movie, The Invention of Lying, where information was needlessly volunteered or offered up and it was hurtful to the hearer. It is expected to be funny and in some ways it was but it wasn’t that funny really. They say you learn something new every day, and in my personal life I am learning to be more kind, and seeking to love better. I am learning that it is not just what you say, but also how you say it. It may not be your intention to hurt others, but you don’t want them to feel that way either.
But don’t get it twisted; this is not to devalue the treasure of truth which always has a tendency to offend those not willing to accept it. This post therefore does not suggest hard love does not exist because some of you just need to be told how it is for what it is and to accept what it is. You need a little push every now and again. You’ve been babysat and coddled and lied to your whole life and for that reason alone any portion of truth will hurt you. You have never felt heartbreak and never known struggle. As such people are always offended at that which they do not and are not willing to accept as the truth. However, there are different avenues at which to distribute this truth. Most of the time when people are brutally honest, when they say something that hurts other people, it is because they simply spoke when there was no need to do so. Learn what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. It is not the honest man who is wiser; it is the honest man who knows when to speak and when not to speak. Knowledge is knowing to be honest. Wisdom is understanding what to say and when to say it.
Love me not Hypocritically
Do not share my joy when I’m whole
And not have compassion on these holes
Cuz
I’ve seen some wars and I admit
Some of these memories are like scenic routes to civil wars
Some of these
Bruises are footsteps soldiers left on my self-esteem
Some of these
Birthmarks led to scripture
You see
Some of these injuries are walking Deuteronomy’s
do not love me
Hypocritically
Do not praise my sunshine without offering me shelter when it rains
Cause trust
I’ve been left out in the cold
That
Forming crease in your face, yea I’ve seen it before
Do not
Love my sun rays just cause you aint seen my floods
Do not accept my heart until you know that there are earthquakes
that left its cracks in my skin
Till you can understand that
Tornadoes left destruction lying desolate in my memories
Do not weep for me
Hypocritically
If you can’t share my joy
And my pain too
Do not praise my strength
then abandon me in those moments I aint too strong
Don’t mutter my lyrics and throw rocks at my song
Do not love me whole
Without having compassion on these holes
Unconditionally
Do not love me
Hypocritically ……
Guest Feature-We Love Like the Sun Rise
We kiss like the night
But we love like a sun rise
We love
like were far out there
Like
halos and moon rocks, and cosmos and jelly fish
We love
Like gravity
We love like autumn
the season where everything learns how to fall and we do
Fall
In love that night
You know, one day I’ll understand the earthquake crack from your pulse
I am the rhythm to any love song that made you want to exist.
So when the sun rises–anxious as it always is—
begins to yawn over the cusps of day
I will be here
may the wind lay us back onto our bed spreads where we can hold,
where we can touch,
where we can love
like the sun rise…
– Brook Yung, (excerpt)
The PBS Blog 