Week 9: Love/Hate
Love (left: Sarah)
There are so many loves, aren't there? Love of self, love of others, love of things and love of love. There is romantic love, platonic love, familial love... the list goes on and on. When most people hear the word love they think romance ~ bleeding hearts, love letters, and writing names in the sky.
Romantic love is a slippery one for me. I guess one could say that I am lucky to have loved and been loved several times, and I suppose I am. It is what they say, love is blind, but it is also big, beautiful and aching. It's a tightly braided chain, twisted with impossible and so much possibility.
The absence of love can crack you into a million stinging pieces. It can haunt you with what ifs? and hows? and whys?.... ahhhh love, sweet, sweet love.
A mother's love is all tangled up with pleasure and pain too. Your child's pain becomes your pain, and their joy, yours. It is boundless and ever-growing. On the day Jinu was born I feel like I woke up from a lifetime of sleeping. I was born that day too, a totally new person - a purpose, an advocate and a lover of something, someone so much greater than myself.
No matter what type of love we are referring to, to me love is comfort, it is where you feel at home.
Hate (right: Mary)
I’ve come to dislike quite a few things while traveling.
Such as bugs (especially mosquitos and ants) in places they don’t belong, constant sweatiness, being dirty, explosive diarrhoea, long bus rides (with piercingly loud screeching music), inappropriately behaved tourists, littered garbage (especially in the sea), the extreme heat, pimples, slow internet connections, dirty beds, bad smells, a constantly itchy nose, turbulence, et cetera.
But, these things don’t really represent ‘hate’ for me. Sure, I would say that ‘I hate the heat’, but I wouldn’t mean it, not really. Hate is too powerful a word, too strong an emotion to be used for these insignificant things.
What I really hate, is arrogance and bullies. I hate liars. I hate pollution. I hate that poverty and hunger affect so many millions. I hate narrow-mindedness, intolerance, and the violence and wars they cause.
This photo is of a collection of UXO’s left in Laos from The Secret War; a proxy war, supplied and supported in part by American forces hoping to gain leverage during The Cold War.
7 comments:
Mary,
Well said ~ it's hard to think of things that truly equal hate. I've been thinking about that a lot based on this week's project.
What I love about you is that you not only say "I hate these things", but you try to do something, anything that will contribute to a change said matters.
As we well know one person really can make a difference, and you my dear friend are one of those people.
You are a constant source of love and inspiration for me.
i LOVE you!
a very powerful combination. what's nice about both commentaries is that love ultimately seems so much more powerful than hate.
I sure love what you two incredible ladies are doing!!
LOVE/HATE two 4 letter words with oh so many meanings.
Hate what ignorance, discrimination, poverty leads to.
Love:
. watching a child learn new things . the world awakening after a Spring rain
. "God's paintbrush" as the sun peeps over/under the horizon
. true friendship
. wet kisses from a young child
. watching squirrels, birds, dolphins at play or feeding.
. etc etc etc
Very relevant topic ladies!
Sare,
love is such a tough subject. Like you said there are so many types of love in our lives, and many of those are constantly shape shifting and creating questions. I would have to agree that for myself love is comfort. Recently I wondered if I use the word love far too often with regards to friends, but I know now that I am just lucky to have so many people in my life that make me feel so comfortable and make me feel that warm and fuzzy "love" feeling.
Why are so many people so scared of the word "love"?
Mary,
I love how you wrote about "hate". It's true how we use hate for such insignificant things like sunburns, coughs, and sore necks (my current list of hates), when there are much more significant things in life and in the world that should have that word reserved for their description. I would certainly put the same things as you at the top of my hate list, accompanied by disease, abuse, needless guilt, and self hate.
Once again, you've outdone yourselves!
love you muchly!
Beautiful & thought provocing photos. Well done, I love both these images.
The thing about both love and hate is the energy. A good story has to evoke both doesn't it. One that's only about love is kind of sappy and boring.
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