westeastsouthnorth:

Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain

westeastsouthnorth:

Navagio, Greece

(by johndoe21ro)

Love is a Mystery.

“It is a mystery why we fall in love. It is a mystery how it happens. It is a mystery when it comes. It is a mystery why some love grows and it is a mystery why some love fails.

You can analyze this mystery and look for reasons and causes, but you will never do anymore than take the life out of the experience. Just as life itself is more than the sum of the bones and muscles and electrical impulses in the body, love is more than the sum of the interests and attractions and commonalities that two people share. And just as life itself is that comes and goes in its own time, so too, the coming of love must be taken as an unfathomable gift that cannot be questioned in its ways.

Sometimes, hopefully at least once in your life the gift of love will come to you in full flower, and you will take hold of it and celebrate it in all inexpressible beauty. This is the dream we share. More often, it will come and take hold of you, celebrate you for a brief moment, then move on. When this happens, to young people, they too often try to grasp the love and hold it to them, refusing to see that it is a gift that is freely given and a gift that just as freely, moves away. When they fall out of love, or the person they love feels the spirit of love leaving, they try desperately to reclaim the love that is lost rather than accepting the gift for what it was, then moving on. They want answers where there are no answers. They want to know what is wrong in them that made the other person no longer love them, or they try to get their lover to change, thinking that if some small things were different, love would bloom again.They blame their circumstances and say that if they go far away and start a new life together, their love will grow. They try anything to give meaning to what has happened. But there is no meaning beyond the love itself, and until they accept its own mysterious ways, they live in a sea of misery.

You need to know this about love, and to accept it. You need to treat what it brings you with kindness. If you find yourself in love with someone who does not love you, be gentle with yourself. There is nothing wrong with you. Love just didn’t choose to rest in the other person’s heart. If you find someone else in love with you and you don’t love him/her, feel honored that love came and called at your door, but gently refuse the gift you cannot return. Do not take advantage; do not cause pain. How you deal with love is how you deal with you, and all our hearts feel the same pains and joys, even if our lives and ways are different. If you fall in love with another, and s/he falls in love with you, and then love chooses to leave, do not try to reclaim it or to assess blame. Let it go. There is a reason and there is a meaning. You will know in time. Remember that you don’t choose love.

Love chooses you.

All you can really do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing, then reach out and give it away. Give it back to the person who brought it alive in you. Give it to others who deem it poor in spirit. Give it to the world around you in anyway you can. This is where many lovers go wrong. Having been so long without love, they revert to seeing their love as a need. They see their hearts as empty places that will be filled by love, and they begin to look at love as something that flows to them rather than from them. The first blush of new love is filled to overflowing,but as their love cools, they revert to seeing their love as need. They cease to be someone who generates love and instead become someone who seeks love. They forget that the secret of love is that it is a gift, and that it can be made to grow only by giving it away. Remember this, and keep it in your heart. Love has its own time, its own seasons, and its own reason for coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it, or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you. But if it chooses to leave from your heart or from the heart of your lover, there is nothing you can do and there is nothing you should do. Love always has been and always will be a mystery. Be glad that it came to live for a moment in your life.

If you keep your heart open, it will come again.”

Letters to My Son by Kent Nerburn.

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop."

Kerouac, On the Road. (via inkless-pen)

(Source: inkless-pen)

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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer’s glue in secret alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares, because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy, incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality, through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens. Screens of shuttering tag clouds and image thumbnails lightning in the mind surfing towards Boards of Canada and Guevara, illuminating all the frozen matrices of time between, megabyted solidities of borders and yesterday’s backyard wiffleball dawns, downloaded drunkenness over rooftops, digital storefronts of flickering flash, a sun and moon of programming joyrides sending vibrations to mobile devices set on manner mode during twittering wintering dusks of Peduca, ashtray rantings and coffee stains that hid the mind, who bound themselves to wireless devices for an endless ride of opiated information from CNN.com and Google on sugary highs until the noise of modems and fax machines brought them down shuddering, with limited and vulgar verbiage to comment threads, battered bleak of shared brain devoid of brilliance in the drear light of a monitor, who sank all night in interface’s light of Pabst floated out and sat through the stale sake afternoon in desolate pizza parlors, listening to the crack of doom on separate nuclear iPods, who texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge lost battalion of platonic laconic self proclaimed journalists committed to a revolution of information, jumping down the stoops off of R&B album covers out of the late 1980s, tweeting their screaming vomiting whispering facts and advices and anecdotes of lunchtime sandwiches and cat antics on couches with eyeballs following and shockwaves of analytics and of authority and finding your passion and other jargon, whole intellects underscored and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all under the gaze of once brilliant eyes.

(via petersantiago)

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