Thirty-one years ago today I had the best and last first date of my life.
Posts in: marriage
Faithful love
From Wendell Berry’s May 2022 Sabbath poem: But the old man knows, contrarily, that this world was made by love. He knows it because that love came to him one time in the person of a girl and it abides in the girl’s great-grandmotherhood. He knows the world was made by love because of his experience of faithful love. As below, so above–an inversion of the Hermetic saying.
“The work by which a man becomes trustworthy”
Greg Cello: Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection.
Life within limits
Oliver Burkeman: A life fully lived just is painfully bittersweet, the joy inextricably intertwined with loss. The major chapters of life, such as your children’s childhoods, just will feel like they’re over too fast, pretty much whatever you do. I am forty-five years old and I’m still trying to accept this, even after years spent reading in wisdom traditions that teach this very thing. It is as if there is a small part of me that knows it is true while everything else within me fights it.