Love is good

We just had an amazing wedding weekend celebrating the union of our daughter Rebekah and her now husband Zachary. It was a celebration of love. It was most welcome for all of us to be reminded: love is good for us!

Most of the research connecting love and health centers on marriage, but experts extrapolate that many of the perks extend to other close relationships. This article outlines research-backed ways that love (feeling connected to other people, respected and valued by other people, and a sense of belonging) and health are linked.

Here’s a few of the benefits:

- Fewer doctor visits, shorter hospital stays (20, 21, 22)

- Faster healing (2005 study at Ohio State University)

- Less depression (23, 24, 25, 26) and substance abuse (8, 9, 10, 11)

- Lower blood pressure, lower stress hormones, increased pain tolerance (research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

- Happier life


As a tribute to the couple and to the love that unites us all, a dear friend (thank you, Jan!) suggested I pass along the words of some of the meaningful readings shared on the special wedding day this past weekend.

May you enjoy these words. And may your relationships be satisfying, connecting, and full of love!

Happy August; please be well.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the  work for which all other work is merely preparation. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person—it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distance…

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distance exists, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of seeing each other as a whole before an immense sky.”

      

Mary Oliver, excerpts of "To Begin With, the Sweet Grass," from Evidence: Poems

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass?

Will the owl bite off its own wings?

Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing?

Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say–behold

the reliability and the finery and the teachings of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water, and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

3.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life—just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same or we change.

Congratulations if you have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.

Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—your life—

what would do for you? 

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.

Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.

That was many years ago.

Since then I have gone out from my confinements, though with difficulty

I mean the ones that are thought to rule my heart.

I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.

They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.

I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.

I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,

I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world

John O’Donohue, excerpts of “A Blessing for Marriage” from To Bless the Space Between Us

As spring unfolds the dream of the earth, / 

May you bring each other’s hearts to birth.

As surprised as the silence that music opens, / 

May your words for each other be touched with reverence.

As warmly as the air draws in the light, / 

May you welcome each other’s every gift.

As twilight harvests all the day’s color, / 

May love bring you home to each other.