rupi kaur – Christina de Vries

Love is Still the Answer

If it’s one thing that will never cease to amaze me, it’s how much hurt people can experience and still be able to dare to love afterward.

We all go through so much with our hearts in our hands, outstretched and vulnerable. Sometimes we experience that heart to meet another one, and they wrap themselves in each other. It can last for a few minutes, weeks, months, or maybe even years.

Other times, that vulnerable heart takes a leap of faith out of your hands, headed straight for the ground with no one to break the fall, just you to pick up the pieces.

Our hearts they bleed, and they scar. They wrap themselves in layers of protection, but somehow they always find a way to strip the layers, sooner or later. Sometimes they need a little help to get those layers off, other times, it’s just self-love that removes those layers, one by one.

Isn’t it amazing how most of us choose to go back to love over and over again, no matter how badly it hurt the last time around? One can sometimes wonder if that makes us the most stupid species of all, or the most wonderful. I choose to see us as wonderful.

For if we don’t choose love to guide us, what does that make us? If the experiences and pain of our past would make us unable to love another, how wasted wouldn’t our lives be?

But the way that we trust and love, it changes. The way we love when we are young and naive is not the same way as we love when we are older and more experienced. I’m not sure that this is a change for the better. I guess it depends on the situation.

I sometimes long for the naive kind of love that I could experience as an early teen before I knew what real heartbreak felt like. Before I learned to fear a possible outcome before I even allow myself to fall. But there’s also a beauty in all the pain one has gone through. The way I’ve learned to pick myself up again, to set boundaries, to love myself enough to say no and to see the love of friends and family to be the purest love of all.

I don’t think I would like to love naively in the world of modern dating. I’m pretty sure that would set me up for disaster. But I do hope that no matter how far away from love I feel like I’m drifting, I will always find my way back to it. That I will always allow myself to trust love again, no matter how much it scares me. And that I won’t be blinded by the layers of past events, so much so that I won’t be able to see new and real love if it crosses my path.

We, humans, are extraordinary in the way that we love when it’s done without games or hidden agendas. When it’s real, pure, and raw. When it’s done from a place of not being able to choose anything other. When we love enough to want the other person happy, no matter if that takes them away from us. When it’s kind and giving. When it’s just love❤️

Love is Still the Answer❤️

This post was inspired by one of my favorite songs from Jason Mraz’s latest album. It’s a song that has brought tears, smiles and moments of me singing out loud and dancing around, hugging myself in my living room❤️

The Poetry That Moves Me

From time to time I come across writers and poets that has a way of putting words together that moves me beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It’s such an intense and wonderful feeling at the same time, and whenever it happens I really do appreciate it although it might be painful.

But there’s something so magical about looking at a piece of paper and in printed words seeing a window into ones own feelings, or a reflection of yourself.

Today I want to highlight a poet that does that for me, time and time again.

Rupi Kaur!

I was introduced to Milk and Honey by a colleague, and have since ended up buying the book multiple times, because I keep giving it away. It’s just too good not to be shared. I also read The Sun and Her Flowers, and loved that one too, even though it didn’t move as many times over as the Milk and Honey did.

The first time I read Milk and Honey, I had to take breaks because I would come across poems that just made me bawl my eyes out. Sometimes it was because I could relate to the pain, other times a wish to feel some of the same joy, and other times it was just like reading my own story, or about heartbreak moments that I recognised all too well.

This one right here is one that still hits me every time:

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I have so much respect for poets and writers that can awaken as much emotion in a reader that I experience when reading this. And when it comes to personal dreams and goals, I would say that this is one of mine for sure; to write stories and poetry that moves people.

To be moved by words is such a powerful experience, and different people all experience it in different ways❤️

It’s true magic!

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If you want to know more about Milk and Honey and/or The Sun and Her Flowers, just click on the book covers below to go their BookDepository page: