POETRY: COULD THIS BE LOVE

Could this be Love?

My heart is open
flying so free
and a new feeling
is arousing in me

I can smile once more
there is happiness in my eyes
I can express what I feel
my heart no longer disguised

No more sadness
no more pain
The sun has come out
now no more rain

What is this feeling
could it be true?
That I have fallen
so deeply in love with you?

Is it real?
Could it be?
That you may possibly
also love me?

Do you feel the same when
I know for sure my feelings are true?
Could you ever possibly
love me like I love you??


2


I lie beside you in the warmth of the night;
I can feel you breathe,
I can hear you sigh so softly.
Tell me now this feeling won?t change-
   It?s a lasting love.
I need to know I can depend on you.
Make me believe you,
Promise you will stay by my side
   Thru the good times and bad.
Bring me your kisses for the rest of my life,
   Feel my days and light my nights.
   I will always be there-
   Tell me you will be there, too.

I have all I want when it comes to loving you.
You are my only reason, you are my only truth.
I need you like water, like breath, like rain.
   I need you like mercy from heaven's gates.
Rescue me from this world full of pain.
When the hope moves me to courage again,
You are the love that rescues me,
when I need someone on whom I can depend.
I can?t go back now, because you brought me too far.
I need you like the sky needs stars.

When I was lost, I could not see.
Now I am found and my heart is free.
   I was alone dreaming of you;
I could not imagine this coming true.
So much joy in everything you touch-
   I want to thank you so much.
Look at the sky, tell me what you see-
   Close your eyes and explain it to me.


3

I long to hold you in my arms
And feel your warmth that gently calms
The words we'll whisper to each other
Will confirm we love no other

I'll hold your body close to mine
My lips embrace your lips divine
I'll touch your face and stroke your hair
And show you that I'll always care

No other special love we'll find
Your eyes meet mine our souls combine
The love tears run like rivers to sea
Since we now know together we're free

The tears of despair will no longer flow
For the years of sadness each of us know
Now that we've seen the love we can gain
We'll be ever so close and together remain

We have the love and the care that is real
And now we're together such joy we shall feel
Loving and sharing each day and each night
Has never before been completely so right


4

A kiss, a touch.
Would do so much.
But from you,
the prettiest of angels.
Would only give my life a meaning.

For this is what I feel,
and only you, my silent witness, will ever know.
Enter the clouds of confusion, the test of our love.
In constant pursuit of your love,
I ride this storm of gyrating cause.
This cannot end, you are my reason,
the one reason I use my free expression.
I ask "Why must this test proceed?".
Even through all the confusion of this powerful storm,
your light shines for my devotion. Now snow capped and frozen,
I wait, I wait for the heat of "Us" to render in time.
The longest year still to come,
come before I can melt to myself,
the person I am.
A person of one, a whole of two.
I can't think straight until I know you,
and when this happens, I then can know myself.
But until this happens, I cannot hate you,
I cannot make love to you,
all I can do is shiver and know that I still am deeply
in love not just the thought, or fantasy,
but with "You".


5


Do not end my life with you
By ending your sateful kiss with me
Which mingles our souls together
As vapors upon the winds whisked by.
But rather keep your lips as part of mine
To touch an even deeper place
That waits and has so long awaited
Someone such as you.

Do not end my life with you
By ending your sweet caress of me
Which holds our heartbeats intertwined
In moments above mortality.
But rather keep your touch as part of mine
To feel much deeper passions
That live and have so long existed
For someone such as you.

Do not end my life with you
By ending your eyebeam's hold on me
Which reveals within us ecstasy and purity's delight.
But rather keep your eyes as part of mine
To see so great my love
That is and has so ever been
For someone such as you.

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POETRY: I MUST HAVE MORE

On a day such as this when sunshine begins to rise upon us
And the night-time of enchanting stars leave, for a time faded,
I fumble in the hue of morning, outstretch my hand to touch you
I am taken in by this moment in time with thoughts of just you and me
And the love that willingly seeded itself inside both of us
Bound together, it is a love full of song for one another to nurture
We encircle each other's world through each day's passing
There it can still be found sharing the same existence
within our hearts
Within a halo of unity it gathers all the precious things
only life can bring
As we greet each day, together hand in hand,
bringing with it a soft freshness
Awakening us to find reasons anew
to fall in love all over again and again
As the summer's warm afternoon sun shifts aimlessly among the clouds
The air vividly wisps by our shoulders
with its gentle voice of touch
Singing to you and me, a love song of joy
emitting all the scents of life
Often it is love that helps us
recognize the abundance of compassion that we possess
Bringing forth forgotten feelings
that in time may become lost in a hidden cascade
Reacquainting wisdom to the mind
to open our hearts for the other to find shelter
As the day slowly unfolds all of its passion for life
within one another's eyes
Blossomed, it has become the seed to grow
and become an unconditional love
For it to unfold into our arms
for what is now caring giving loving and needing
The essence of what true love is
in sharing a lifetime with the one who holds your soul
To be awakened with the sun arising
and to gaze at the enchanting stars approaching
To dream and be loved  
be loved and to dream with the other one that is your heart


2


Nothing is ever perfect
Except my love for you

Like a rose it blooms with time
But this feeling is like a flower
That will never die

This flower you can't hold in your hand
But will be forever in your heart


3

Beautiful lad, queen of beauty
You crawled into this lonely heart of mine
With the gentleness of invertebrate crawlers
You reached the delicate spot of my soul

When the world is weak and weary
Of the things that were and never will be
With a sense of purpose and clear vision
You make sure all is within my reach

Slow and steady you walked into me
Taking control of all that was within me
Cloud and moon, sun and stars...
All bear witness to the glory you bring

You lift me up to your lovely chest
And hold me tight to your succulent skin
You never for once let me grow cold
You didn't let grass grow under my feet


4

the tenderness of your lips 
is all I can feel 
in this unknown reality
with my eyes shut 
I ignore the outside world 
and let my spirit fly
our lips embraced 
for what seemed hours 
then it all ended 
my heart was still racing 
but for reasons unknown 
I know that this wasn't just a dream 
but a connection and intertwining 
of our spiritual selves 
and I know only one thing...

...I must have more

ARTICLE: HUFFINGTON POST Artificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor Says BY Kathleen Miles

An Oxford philosophy professor who has studied existential threats ranging from nuclear war to superbugs says the biggest danger of all may be superintelligence.

Superintelligence is any intellect that outperforms human intellect in every field, andNick Bostrom thinks its most likely form will be a machine -- artificial intelligence.

There are two ways artificial intelligence could go, Bostrom argues. It could greatly improve our lives and solve the world's problems, such as disease, hunger and even pain. Or, it could take over and possibly kill all or many humans. As it stands, the catastrophic scenario is more likely, according to Bostrom, who has a background in physics, computational neuroscience and mathematical logic.

"Superintelligence could become extremely powerful and be able to shape the future according to its preferences," Bostrom told me. "If humanity was sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figure out how to do so safely."

Bostrom, the founding director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, lays out his concerns in his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. His book makes a harrowing comparison between the fate of horses and humans:

Horses were initially complemented by carriages and ploughs, which greatly increased the horse's productivity. Later, horses were substituted for by automobiles and tractors. When horses became obsolete as a source of labor, many were sold off to meatpackers to be processed into dog food, bone meal, leather, and glue. In the United States, there were about 26 million horses in 1915. By the early 1950s, 2 million remained.

The same dark outcome, Bostrom said, could happen to humans once AI makes our labor and intelligence obsolete.

It sounds like a science fiction flick, but recent moves in the tech world may suggest otherwise. Earlier this year, Google acquired artificial intelligence company DeepMind and created an AI safety and ethics review board to ensure the technology is developed safely. Facebook created an artificial intelligence lab this year and is working on creating an artificial brain. Technology called "deep learning," a form of artificial intelligence meant to closely mimic the human brain, has quickly spreadfrom Google to Microsoft, Baidu and Twitter.

And while Google's Ray Kurzweil has long discussed a technological "singularity" in which AI replaces humans, a giant in the tech world recently joined Kurzweil in vocalizing concern. Elon Musk, co-founder of SpaceX (space transport) and Tesla (electric cars), tweeted earlier this month:

Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable

-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

I spoke with Bostrom about why he's worried and how we should prepare.

You write that superintelligent AI could become dangerous to humans because it will seek to improve itself and acquire resources. Explain.

Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

Could we program the AI to create no more than 100 paper clips a day for, say, a total of 10 days?

Sure, but now the AI is trying to maximize the probability that it will make exactly 100 paper clips in 10 days. Again, you would want to eliminate humans because they could shut you off. What happens when it's done making the total 1,000 paper clips? It could count them again or develop a more accurate counting apparatus -- perhaps one that is the size of the planet or larger.

You can imagine an unlimited sequence of actions perhaps with diminishing returns but nonetheless some positive values to the AI that would even increase by a tiny fraction the probability of reaching the goal. The analogy extends to any AI --- not just one programed to make paper clips. The point is its actions would pay no heed to human welfare.

Could we make its primary goal be improving the human condition, advancing human values -- making humans happy?

Well, we'd have to define then what we mean by being happy. If we mean feeling pleasure then perhaps the superintelligent AI would stick electrodes onto every human brain and stimulate our pleasure centers. Or you could take out the body altogether and have our brains bathing in a drug the AI could design. It turns out to be quite difficult to specify a goal of what we want in English -- let alone in computer code.

Similarly, we can't be confident in our current set of human values. One can imagine what would have happened if some earlier human age had had the opportunity to lay down the law for all time -- to encode their understanding of human values once and for all. We can now look back and see they had huge moral blind spots.

In the book, you say there could be one superintelligent AI -- or multiple. Explain.

In one scenario, you have one superintelligent AI and, without any competition, it has the ability to shape the future according to its preferences. Another scenario is multipolar, where the transition to superintelligence is slower, and there are many different systems at roughly comparable level of development. In that scenario, you have economic and evolutionary dynamics coming into play.

In a multipolar scenario, there's the danger of a very rapid population explosion. You could copy a digital mind in a minute, rather than with humans, where it takes a couple of decades to make another adult. So the digital minds could increase so quickly that their incomes drop to subsistence level -- which would probably be lower than for a biological mind. Then humans would no longer be able to support themselves by working, and, most likely, would die out. Alternatively, if social structures somehow continue to hold, some humans could gain immense capital returns from superintelligence that they could use to buy more computer hardware to run more digital minds.

Are you saying it's impossible to control superintelligence because we ourselves are merely intelligent?

It's not impossible -- it's extremely difficult. I worry that it will not be solved by the time someone builds an AI. We're not very good at uninventing things. Once unsafe superintellignce is developed, we can't put it back in the bottle. So we need to accelerate research of this control problem.

Developing an avenue towards human cognitive enhancement would be helpful. Presuming superintelligence doesn't happen until the second half of the century, there could still be time to develop a cohort of cognitively enhanced humans who might have the capacity to try to solve this really difficult technical control problem. Cognitively enhanced humans will also presumably be able to better consider long-term effects. For example, today people are creating more energy-efficient chips to extend the battery life of cell phones -- without thinking about what the long-term effects could be. With more intelligence, we would be able to.

Cognitive enhancement could take place through collective cognitive ability -- the Internet, for example, and institutional innovations that enable humans to function better together. In terms of individual cognitive enhancement, the first thing likely to be successful is genetic selection in the context of in-vitro fertilization. I don't hold out much for cyborgs or implants.

What should we do to prepare for the risk of superintelligence?

If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause.

Attempts to affect the overall rate of development in computer science, neuroscience and chip manufacturing are likely to be futile. There are enormous incentives to make incremental progress in the software and hardware industries. Progress towards superintelligence thus far has very little do with long-term concern about global problems -- and more to do with making big bucks.

Also, we have problems with collective human wisdom and rationality. At the moment, we are very poor at addressing big global challenges. Even with something as straightforward as global warming -- where you have a physical principle and rising temperature you can measure -- we are not doing a great job. In general, working towards making the world more peaceful and collaborative would be helpful for a wide range of existential catastrophes.

There are maybe six people working full time on this AI control problem. We need to add more brilliant brains to this technical work. I'm hoping my book will do something to encourage that. How to control superintelligent AI is really the most important task of our time -- yet, it is almost completely ignored.

ARTICLE: NYTIMES The Intelligent-Life Lottery by George Johnson

The Intelligent-Life Lottery by George Johnson

Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.

But Sagan’s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan’s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one — Homo sapiens — had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth’s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.

Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system — 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.

That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn’t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.

Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest — just a fraction of NASA’s budget.

“If you don’t ante up,” he wrote, “you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.”

Three years ago, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it wasthreatened by wildfire — another reminder of the precariousness of the search.

It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and — at least in the case of humans — to wonder what it is all about.

Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers — 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 — that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and — maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito — purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.

According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and — round after round — hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.

In one of my favorite books, “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.

Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him — idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.

For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us “with a new kind of amazement” and “a frisson for the improbability of the event” — a fellow agnostic’s version of an epiphany.

“We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,” he wrote. “Replay the tape a million times,” he proposed, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.”

Other biologists have disputed Gould’s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.

But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” seem to have “hit upon a relatively simple solution to life’s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.” Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, “may well be just an aesthetic preference.”

In “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.

“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,” Dr. Drake told him. “Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.”

He knew the odds of tuning in — at just the right frequency at the right place and time — were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.

“We’ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,” he said.

ARTICLE:Why it’s hell to be a doctor in America today By Susannah Cahalan

Why it’s hell to be a doctor in America today

By Susannah Cahalan

Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is mad as hell.

American health care is in upheaval. On one side, overhead and malpractice insurance costs keep increasing, while salaries stagnate. On the other, patients believe that expensive drugs are better, more people are on government-run insurance that pays less, while private insurance fights every claim.

Now doctors spend most of their time trying to game the system, requiring endless paperwork, protracted bureaucratic battles and “treadmill medicine,” seeing as many patients as possible in as little time. This problem will only intensify as millions join the ranks of the insured under the Affordable Care Act.

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Dr. Sandeep JauharPhoto: Maryanne Russell

In this self-perpetuating cycle, doctors spend most of their time as businessmen — and care suffers.

It’s no wonder then that doctors no longer enjoy their jobs, explains Jauhar, director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and author of “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), out now.

“This book is meant to be like the scene in ‘Network’ when [Howard Beale] opens the window and yells, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore,’ ” Jauhar says in an interview with The Post.

“I see an emotional emptiness created by the relentless consideration of money. Most of us went into medicine for intellectual stimulation or the desire to develop relationships with patients, not to maximize income,” he writes.

In a 2008 study of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Even insurance claim clerks polled in a different study were happier.

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Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

As managed care has grown (by the 2000s, 95% of insured workers were in some kind of managed care plans), so has physicians’ discontent. In 1973, fewer than 15% of physicians reported any doubts about career choices. Today nearly 40% say that they would not choose to enter the medical profession if given the opportunity to do it all over.

If things continue as they are, the US can expect a shortage of 150,000 doctors by 2025, according to the American Medical College. Jauhar says that doctors on the online community SERMO are threatening to leave the country or scrap their private practices.

The serious downside here is obvious: Unhappy doctors make for unhappier patients.

“The physician-patient relationship is the worst it ever was,” he says.

To hammer in this point, Jauhar quotes facts from the Commonwealth Fund: The US ranks 45th in life expectancy (“behind Bosnia and Jordan,” he adds) and compared to other developed countries near last in infant mortality and health-care quality, access and efficiency. We also have fewer physicians and hospital beds than average.

This “mid-life crisis in medicine” is reflected in Jauhar’s own writing.

Readers can follow his skepticism in “Intern,” his first book about his internship year at New York Presybterian, harden into disillusionment in “Doctored,” which chronicles his time at LIJ as he enters his middle age (he’s now 44).

“Doctored” opens with: “When I look at my career in midlife, I realize that in many ways I have become the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: impatient, occasionally indifferent, at times dismissive or paternalistic.”

This “kind of doctor,” once so idealistic, now takes morally ambiguous speaking gigs with pharmaceutical companies and side-jobs at “sketchy” cardiologist private practices who push for expensive and often unnecessary tests for the reimbursements.

And this is where the book gets really bleak. Doctors — like his own brother, also a cardiologist — refer to patients as “commodities.” One physician at LIJ admitted that “sometimes you have to drag out” a hospital stay for a patient if you want to get paid.

He writes about one of his patients, a 50-something man who complained of shortness of breath. Fourteen doctors, 12 procedures, and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, he was released with minimal improvement.

This is a problem not only of milking income, which of course happens, but because doctors just don’t have the time to do their jobs. Primary care physicians (doctors who Jauhar believes are most unhappy) spend an average of eight to 10 minutes per patient.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. With less time for each patient—studies show (no surprise here) that rushed doctors listen less — relying on expensive tests, which don’t necessarily lead to more accurate diagnoses. Med school advises doctors-in-training that you should be able to diagnose 80% of cases with a health history and an exam alone. No further tests required.

But in this exam on-the-run environment, doctors are more likely to practice “defensive medicine,” or “cover your ass” medicine — costing us about $750 billion a year (of the $3.8 trillion we spend a year) in wasteful procedures that lead nowhere.

“After so many years in medicine, I am convinced of one thing: The vast majority of doctors aren’t bad. It is the system that makes us bad, makes us make mistakes,” he writes. “There is a palpable sense of grieving. The job for many has become just that — a job.”

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LOVE/ JOURNAL: WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT LOVE

I am the first to admit that when I used to get involved with someone, I would fall hard and fast like granite. I know I’m not alone. This is pretty typical, because INFATUATION feels like LOVE…sort of. Infatuation feels frenzied, intense, overwhelming, like you NEED the person. You are drunk on them, they are your addiction.Love at first sight is bullshit. You might argue with me on this because it happened to YOU – but hey! I never said it never works out. Even if you have had a lifelong love affair with the person you “fell in love with”  immediately, it was not love – it morphed into it.

You do not know a person, not truly, for years. Everyone is on their best behaviour at first – you start to love how amazing they are, idealize them, and think that having them in your life will make YOU a better person, and you want to do the same for them. You want to drown in each other because your pheromones are off the charts and you want to surf that wave of serotonin every fucking day until you pass out, just to wake up and do it again.

When you start to feel like you are in withdrawal from not being around them, ask yourself if you’re in love with the person and all their faults, or in love with your image of them, or their POTENTIAL (ugh)! In the beginning, that’s all it can be. Love is based on reality. If your partner seems to have no negative side, you are deceiving yourself. Perfection is a fantasy.


Never give up the things you love doing in order to be with someone new. This is fucking terrifying for them.Why would you give up your dreams and passions just to hang out and fuck someone you barely know all day? That can happen the majority of the time outside of everything else, but never make your relationship your ONLY reason for living. Being someone’s ONLY source of pleasure is completely awful, because then you feel pressured to live not only your life for you, but for them, too, and they will always depend on you to feel awesome.



Loving someone hard means allowing them to do what they need to do to be THEMSELVES. If you want to be with a writer (for a very good example) don’t expect to come first. Often, when people are intensely into something (which is very attractive), you will always come second, especially in the beginning. Is this bad? Not necessarily. If they feel loved enough to be able to live life the way they want and be who they are, they will respect and appreciate your relationship so much more. To try and hold someone back is the worst thing you can possibly do in a relationship – and the same goes for if someone is trying to do this for you. Even worse, if you find yourself being held back by someone, get out FAST. Sometimes it happens without you even realizing it! You will feel so repressed that you will explode, and probably not in a purely positive way (happened to me). Make sure you let your loved one be who they need to be, and make sure they let you do the same.

That being said, if you are being completely neglected, that person is not right for you, and you should not try to change them. Find someone more suitable. If you are putting in everything you’ve got, and they’re not, then it’s completely unbalanced. You might even be putting them off. If they are not matching you in enthusiasm, back off, or just give it up completely and find someone else.

Your sweetheart doesn’t need to know all your tiny weird habits, but declare anything big that might change their whole perception of you.  This may very well scare someone off, but that means they are not right for you, and you have saved both of yourselves some time.

This was something I heard from an ex of mine, after we broke up – Love doesn’t just magically happen. It IS magical, but love grows. Infatuation can be instant, but like I said before, love must be cultivated, tended to, nurtured over time. You can’t just stick a seed in the ground and expect a fucking rose to be there the next day. It takes a lot of patience and coaxing, and it will develop IF everything is right. You can tell fairly quickly what is missing, and if it worth continuing. Some things just won’t grow, no matter how much you pour into the soil.

The typical “If you can’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else?” thing is annoyingly true. If you need someone else to validate your existence, you need to turn inward before getting involved with anyone, and make yourself into a person you are proud of. You have to think you are awesome, or you are going to settle for a lot of shit, including shit people. When you are full of love for yourself, confident, and know you are amazing, people notice, and they will flock to you. You will have your choice of amazing people to have in your life.

It seems that most people I encounter feel a nagging emptiness. They can’t put their finger on what it is, they only know that it needs to be filled. So, they go on searching for something that they think will fill the space.

Their life is spent seeking; buying new things, achieving goals, collecting titles and degrees, searching for “the one” that will complete them etc. There’s a belief that when they get enough “stuff”, they will feel full.

It’s so easy for us to believe that there’s something “out there” in the world that will fill the feeling of emptiness. You’ll find as you search, only more searching and a deepening need to find a new thing that will magically fulfill you, even though everything else before has fallen short.

One of the most commonplace and dangerous beliefs in our culture is that a relationship will provide the missing piece that will finally make us whole. TV and pop-culture shows us that the perfect partner is what we need to make us happy. The happy ending of every romantic comedy teaches us that, once we find that special one, everything in our life will be wonderful.

We just needed that puzzle piece, that other half, that soul mate to complete us. This is a commonly accepted delusion. The belief that a soul mate will make our life wonderful and will complete us is backwards.

You must be complete and feel whole, needing nothing outside of you to fulfill you before you can hope to have a fulfilling, healthy, truly loving relationship. When you  know that there is nothing that you need someone to give you that you don’t already possess within, then you are ready for mature love.

Love, marriage, family and togetherness are extremely important aspects of life. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t exist without them. They are a huge part of your well-being.

However, believing that your soul mate will come into your life and make things okay or that your whole life is a mess because your partner is misbehaving, is a problem. This kind of attitude makes that one relationship special above all others, and implies that you are not okay without it. This plants the seeds of failure before a potentially truly loving relationship is even given the chance to blossom.

If someone has the power to make you feel love, because this also means that you believe that they have the power to deprive you of love. Making someone the source of love in this way means that specific person is the one who has to give you love, or else you won’t have love.

He or she then becomes the object that you have to get love from and this sends a message to others, to yourself and to the universe at large that you lack love, that you aren’t worthy or capable of having it. Getting love from an outside source causes tremendous issues in your life and in your relationship because love is as much a need for humans as is food or water. If you believe that only that special person has the power to give it to you or take it away, you’ll do whatever you can to “get” the love from this other person.

Love is as much of human need as food and water. You will cry, beg or manipulate the other into giving it to you if you believe it will work. Just as you would scratch someone’s eyes out to get to water if you were dying of thirst. Herein lies relationship disintegration.

Relationships fail because partners feel that they aren’t getting love from their mate, or their mate isn’t meeting their needs. The truth is: your partner not meeting your needs is not what is causing the disintegration; feeling like you have needs that your partner can meet is actually the problem. Love cannot be gotten, only felt, given and expressed.

To deny your need for love is to deny your humanity. However, when the other person has to meet certain expectations and follow your rules in order for you to feel good, that isn’t love, it’s manipulation and control.

If the other person fails to give love to you in the way that you think they should, you feel that you have a “right” to be upset and then you have the right to punish them. You believe that you are then justified in withholding love from them or make them feel bad because they were not the partner you wanted them to be.

This belief that we have needs for love that have to be fulfilled only by specific people in specific ways, is pervasive in our culture. It’s the cause of all of our relationship issues. We are addicted to romantic relationships and placing the source of love outside of ourselves.

Then we develop all kinds of unhealthy patterns in a struggle to get the love. We will even allow ourselves to be abused, or we will become abusers. Some have even killed because they felt their mate deprived them of love.

We don’t see this struggling for what it is: a dysfunctional anti-love and anti-happiness condition. True love is unconditional, it loves regardless of the other person’s moods and actions. You can’t have love in an authentic and lasting way if you believe that you have to get love.

The key to lasting, authentic love is recognizing that you are the source of love and making it your job to bring that love to your relationship.

In other words, to know that you are whole must come first and from that fullness you can give without wanting to be given to in return. Whenever you feel a need for love, instead of seeking for it you can empower yourself and think loving thoughts, speak loving words and act in loving ways. In essence, you choose to recognize that you are the source of love for others.

POETRY: TO ME LOVE MEANS FOREVER

Once I was afraid
Of love and it's wonders.
For I had been hurt again and again
by the so called... love of others.
So I tried to hide from the powerful spell
by shielding my heart to those who thought it was theirs.
I shaded myself in the darkness of life,
hoping to never be discovered.
Yet I was wrong to feel all alone,
because you were always by my side.
But it took me some time to realize
that you, my dear, were my only true lover.
And I thank you, my love, for showing me the light.
For without you...
I would still be just another shadow in the night.

2

In loving you... 
I have experienced the happiness, the hurt, 
The feeling of forever, the need to be with you and to love you.

It's all inside of me; it's you I always think about, 
It's you I always miss, and it will always be you, 
Because you're the one I love.

To me, love means forever...
No one will ever take your place or know me as you do.
You will always know what I am thinking about 
And what I'm feeling deep down.

I'll never love anyone the way I love you!  
You know who you are!

LOVE LETTER: MY HEART WILL START BEATING

Dear Soulmate

Once I get to see you, everything will get back to it's original place.My heart will start beating again,  my hopes will rise to the top,  my dreams will once again come true...once I see, touch and feel you. Once more, just once more will be good enough for me to survive and wake up from this terrible dream ...of not having you. I'm still asleep. My wake up call will be your soft and tender lips touching mine without worries or problems.  But again, every time I remember that this is not a dream, that this is reality, it makes me feel stronger, gives me the strength to proceed with my desires of having you once and for all. From my big broken heart, these words...I say: love will touch some minds

Will touch all the heart beats from that woman I must have...or else this poor heart of mine will just brake and fall apart....I shall proceed with my demands of loving you day and night, rain or sunshine, and never be apart from that lonely heart of yours because I'm the only one that will ever bring that glow to those sweet and tender lips of yours.If you think I'm making all this up, you are completely wrong, because this lonely heart of mine desires you and nothing more...If you ever see me crying, please don't ask me why, just go and say, baby, I love you and you are my only one.   The love we share, is like trees to air. Without one-another, there would be no other. Without you, I could not exist. I'll love you forever, that's what I insist.Feel The love whispered through my breath and my gentle touch that took away pain. Let me kiss your lips  and bring warmth to your heart. Let me falter so I can look into your healing eyes. Let me hold your hand and wrap you in my arms. Smile  and melt my heart. Kiss me and take away my breath. Dance with me and forever play our song. ...Is a journey to find inner peace,only in tranquility- can we be free;Others notice our outward space, focusing inward, radiating harmony.What is beautiful about another? A sound, look, touch drawn asunder; A feeling of contentment to the soul, where beauty resides, on the whole. The eyes, a window, to that place,  surrounded by your living vestige face; Encompassing all that is thought, in a harboring body, beauty is caught;The simple pleasures we perceive,allow us all to believe;There is beauty in all we say and do,there is beauty in me and beauty in you.


How do i tell you in a few words i love you. Where do i begin to tell you how beautiful you are you have shown me your love so true  no matter where you are, i'll never be too far. When you awake and don't see me all you have to do is look in the mirror with sleepy eyes it's hard to see my love for you will reflect, nothing could be clearer. I found in you a lady who loves me without a doubt by your side is where i want a lifetime to spend our love has planted its seed and begun to sprout thru thick and thin i'm here till the end. The most beautiful rainbow couldn't compare you must have been sent to me from above. I see your beauty from within your heart, dear. I promise to shower you with all of my love . When i tell you you're beautiful, it's my heart's reflection your love has shown me the true meaning of forever with just a whisper you have my complete attention nobody has loved me like you have...never. Each day i awake and find you're not here. I close my eyes and picture the night before. I see my lady i will have a lifetime of love to share seeing you there is like opening heaven's door. These are my thoughts as i imagine our beautiful scene together we sit on the rocks near the creek before me is a beauty and love i have never felt or seen. I reach my hand out and place it tenderly on your cheek. Seeing myself in those beautiful eyes. My baby blues tell you i love you with all my heart as i look up i see a pair of doves fly by like the air between their wings, we'll never part reaching down i pick a beautiful purple flower. This flower was born from nature's care  it needs the sun and sprinkles from a shower  nature's true beauty is the only way our love could compare. Our love flows steadily like the rambling stream  with each sunrise our love will begin forever you are in my heart and dreams my eyes open... i fall in love with you all over again