When You Feel Dead [Migrated Post]

Imagine life without love, giving, and sacrifice.

I think that none of us on this planet will enjoy a good life without understanding the true meaning of sacrifice.

Not any one can continue breathing air, for goodness sakes, without experiencing loss, without fighting for what they value, without surrendering their all to faith and hope that there’s still goodness in this world.

Not any one deserves to take in oxygen when all they can be is mere existence and can only do one thing: Give out carbon dioxide. Instead of bearing fruitions of love, such as joy and peace and patience, you’re merely taking up space and polluting the air. And because love is an action (as opposed to fickle feelings), it takes work – lots of hard, toilsome, time-consuming work.

Love is a lifelong labor to honor grace to its highest – higher than any human being on earth. It’s quite an impossible task, but you have to do it – you have to try for life. And so, to die for love is to be alive.

Your birthday was the day when you’re given the priceless gift to live. How you live your life is a way to show your gratuity to the ones that gave you life – the priceless people to whom, no matter what you do or how much you give in return for their gracious love, you will never fully cover the gift they’ve freely sacrificed their all for you.

Coming into existence without leaving behind a goodwill legacy is like serving a clean but empty plate on the dining table, with no dust to sweep, no dirt to wash away – no mountains to move, no obstacles to overcome, none whatsoever to go through, nothing to do with the plate except throwing it away as if thrusting a boomerang as far away as you can, leaving the broken pieces disperse into the distance and be gone from existence forever.

This is exactly how I sometimes feel, taking in oxygen for granted.

Immature Love Vs Mature Love [Migrated Post]

Immature love says I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you’. - Erich Fromm

I don’t consider myself fully ripe yet, but at its core I know that true love’s very nature is about being mature.

Love can only begin when you are righteous. Righteousness is a decision to firmly maintain an upright disposition in every respect of your being. It is the very essence of being mature.

I believe love ennobles us with gracious ethos. When we do things in love, it forces us to discern the difference between what we need and what we want.

George Orwell once said that sometimes, the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious, and as a lover of wisdom, I believe it’s worth retelling what’s been told in every religion and across all faiths of humanity: What you ever need, you already have.

I believe we can be nothing else greater than vessels of love. When we’re willing to submit to the abundance of grace that is readily available for us to perceive, we roost a heartfelt affection for one another, and our selves are made lovely in its grace.

Too often we think or feel we still need something outside of ourselves when every inch of this potential is already lying inside you. Think about those moments when you lose yourself into a project you’re passionate about. You become the child you used to be, sitting on the floor in stillness, quietly drawing out your figments of imagination.

Like the child’s innocence, I believe we don’t need a reason to love the subject or object of our affection, nor we should be ignorant of concedable dangers while indulging in our passions, for love is not the exclusion of reason, but the marriage between reason and passion.

It is about being still no matter what comes your way. Whether your loved ones have surpassed or transgressed, you maintain peace at heart and loves him or her any how.  Whenever you make mistakes in your drawing process, you forgive yourself and keep going anyway. You don’t seek to glorify your self or your other half, but you give honor to the truth – that all you need is love.

When we are conscious of this truth, we can only satisfy our lives through more giving and less of receiving. Merely a vessel of love, we no longer feel deserving special treatments. We stop comparing ourselves with one another. We stop holding selfish thoughts or think we can only feel good through the possession of another. Instead, we feel good by our inherent human need for each other's support, and we do this by giving and forgiving others no matter what happens.

Love requires no prerequisites. You don’t have to win every argument or take the number-one spot in every competition to be able to give love and forgive those who have done you wrong. It simply requires you to accept the truth – that all you ever need, you already have.

Once you submit to the truth, love blooms and becomes a continuous dance of correspondence with the Creator of love, a beautiful life as portrayed like the drawing imagined to reality by the innocent, yet mature child.

Romance That Lasts: "Eleven Minutes" by Paulo Coelho [Migrated Post]

If there is one memorable romance book that has left a permanent impression on me, it's Eleven Minutes.
Internationally-acclaimed author Paulo Coelho, or better known as the scribe behind the classic bestseller The Alchemist, have always wanted to write about a love story exploring sex in the context of it being a spiritual experience. The inspiration gave birth to Eleven Minutes, a young girl’s journey to discovering true love in the most extreme conditions. With her immense curiosity and a heartbroken past, our young heroine redefines pleasure by veiling her deepest, most vulnerable self as a prostitute throughout her numerous encounters with men from all walks of life.

She found that, contrary to popular belief, men seek to pay not just for penetration, but mostly for refuge, for strength, for a pillar, for a shoulder to lean on, for a listener to share his burdens with, and sometimes even therapy. “A man doesn’t prove he’s a man by getting an erection,” explains a friend to our protagonist. “He’s only a real man if he can pleasure a woman.”

So what happens when she meets a man who saw that there’s more to her than a fairy godmother – that there lies an “inner light” in her soul?

This is the man she eventually fell in love with, and with whom she must face many trials to phase out her early convictions that “love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer.”

Though it sounds like a simple-enough plot and not many will see the romantic aspect of a prostitute’s story, I think that her idealizations about true love and the sacredness of sex are almost otherworldly. Fortified with a strong mind and a great self-control over her own emotions, the physical act of penetration does close to nothing to affect her ethos. She must fully submit all of her self, her whole psyche, in order to experience a lasting pleasure that endures more than just the fleeting eleven-minute moment in a hotel room.

Who know sex can be so intense. But this book's pretty much shaped how I define love and its integral underpinnings on sex.


Love, Stace