Next to blood relationships, come water relationships. —Stanley Crawford

   

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It is only necessary to know that love is a direction not a state of the soul. 

If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

—Simone Weil

The Love of God and Affliction, Waiting for God

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In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood -

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks - is it a cave,

Or winding path? The edge is what I have. 

—Theodore Roethke

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