Spent a portion of today listening to a recording of Michael Enright reading, The Gift of the Magi. William Sidney Porter, writing as O. Henry, had the gentlest of touches when it came to conveying the deepest emotions that reside at the heart of the human condition.
I have to admit that I often get emotions and feelings quite confused. I suspect that my somewhat dysfunctional love life, as played out over the course of my adult life, is the clearest evidence of this.
Love is quite simple when viewed in the guise of my two daughters, my son, my faith, and any number of dogs that I have had over the years.
It is quite another question when it is the love of romance. Hmmm..I'm sidetracking with that statement. I do romance quite well, thank you; it is the place beyond romance and infatuation that tends to hold reefs and other dangers that my ship has regularly run aground on.
Well, I am a work in progress and with luck will make some in this area. Living alone is not a bad thing, but I much prefer two over one. Then there is the niggling suspicion that is growing in me that I am becoming shopworn goods.
Huh, aren't those empowering thoughts?
I have always most enjoyed the older translation of Paul's 1st letter to the Corinthians where the modern word love was translated as charity.
We modern folk have as many meanings for the word love as can be imagined, or perhaps as are necessary to make it mean what we need it to mean at a given moment. Charity on the other hand is an almost universal expression of opening oneself up to another. Replace the word love with the word charity in 1 Corinthians 13 and you get an ideal to aspire to that is so radical and so apparently unattainable, yet that every heart has a niche waiting for for and that every heart instantly recognizes.
God, what a rambler.
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