Love was a promise made of smoke.

So, this is my first post here, and I'm hoping to make this a place to keep a record of happy things. Horrible and awful things happen every day, but there are also so many things to love and admire and be awed by. And that's why I'm writing here: to record them (along with various other thoughts, randomness, ramblings, and conversations with myself), for me and also for anyone who happens to read. Last night, I had some good conversations with a few friends regarding love: what it is, how it works, whether or not romantic love can last and whether it's worth the risk. Thinking about love, being intentional about it is important, and that too is a reason I'm writing here.

The name of this blog comes from a passage in Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse: "Love [...] seems paramount to me. Seeing through the world, explaining it, despising it may be crucial to great thinkers. But all I care about is to be able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it or myself, to be able to view it and myself and all beings with love and admiration and awe." When I was thinking about starting to write here and centering this writing on this passage, I was reminded of a verse, which turned out to be 1 John 2:15: "Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." I remember hearing that verse when I was younger and worrying about whether god's love was in me because I did love the world. At that time, the world was friends and family and Ninja Turtles and breakfast cereal and Christmas and birthdays and bicycles, all things worth loving and all things that I loved and still do, except for maybe Ninja Turtles. But, it turns out John wasn't talking about those things but, instead, greed and lust and pride and the things that lead to those things, which are also in the world. I think god wants us to love the world but to be able to separate out the things worth loving from those that are not. And that is yet another reason why I'm writing here: to separate and sift, to find the wheat among the chaff.

Yesterday was a grey day. Rainy and windy, cold and dreary. But, for just a few precious minutes, the sun came out. So I walked out of my office, down the stairs, and I stood in the sun. And though the chill of the wind negated any warmth the sun might have provided, it was a moment of brilliance and beauty. I love the rain, but a moment of sun during days of rain is something special. When something happens to break us out of the normal and the usual, it's good to pause and take it in and appreciate the difference. I was in Portland over the weekend. Portland has a lot of grey days, and it was grey and drizzly most of the time that I was there, but on Monday morning, the sun broke through for a bit, and I went outside to enjoy it then too. Sun in the midst of the rain, both literally and figuratively, is something worthy of love.