We asperges are numb with sorrow at violence, and with rage at the senselessness of this. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution. We will never again be quite the same. But this will be our reply to violence: to make love and life more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each day we will commemorate that courage, and reaffirm the faith in the Triumph of the Mind.
Every man has a right over his own body and violence destroys lives that were full of promise; it ravages the fruits of human toil, and much besides.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
Cardinal on an apple tree, Credit to N.W
Selbstwehr 
Cardinals are the singer of life. May the sunrise never leaves you.
Loves exposes you to vulnerabilities you did not know you have. Love costs more than anything else I’ve ever known but I do not regret it.
Like all the great creations of humanity, love is twofold: it is the supreme happiness and the supreme misfortune … Lovers pass constantly from rapture to despair, from sadness to joy, from wrath to tenderness, from desperation to sensuality … The lover is perpetually driven by contradictory emotions. Popular language, in all times and all places, abounds in expressions that describe the vulnerability of a person in love: love is a wound, an injury. But as St. John of the Cross says, it is ‘a wound that is a gift,’ a ‘gentle cautery,’ a ‘delightful wound.’ Yes, love is a flower of blood. It is also a talisman: the vulnerability of lovers protects them. Their shield is their lack of defense; their armor is their nakedness. [ … ] Yet despite all the ills and misfortunes it brings, we always endeavor to love and be loved. Love is the closest thing on this earth to the beatitude of the blessed.”
— Octavio Paz, from The Double Flame
May the memory of your faith in love lives with us forever.
You will be missed my love. This blog will continue to be our treasure.