Familiar fears

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." - Ranier Maria Rilke

How many of us live in reaving fear, lashing out to quell the many storms around us before they, in their own terrors lash out against us? How many of us, hushed into pale denial by the staggering immensity of our own self-loathing, seek so fanatically, so fervently to rend apart from the shaded lives of strangers, that very horror that we know lies treacherously within ourselves? It is as if the level of ferociousness our hatred carries is rivaled only by the depths of our fear and the starkness of our understanding. Though the ignorant may respond in fear to the unknown, it is the wise, the ones living in undeniable familiarity that must struggle between the freedom of a far-leaping grace and the temptation of an alluring, dark hate. As creatures whose passions rise and fall so easily upon life's capricious whims, we fall all too often within the grasp of our own hated weaknesses found in another. And thus, we do not always attack to win, we do not always fight to triumph or to survive; there are times when our desperate struggles are for nothing more than the sake of shattering mirrors so that we will not be haunted by our own familiar, lingering truth. Perhaps we have all become dragons of a sort, eagerly hunting each other down in our own desperation to end a self-afflicted misery too blind to accept love with grace, and so unable to offer it in turn to another. And so we shall remain, preying upon others in a constant attempt to flee from ourselves, until we finally grasp the courage to withstand such familiar, well-worn fears and to love and pull one another out of drowning shadows with a powerful grace whose soft touch carries with it it's own strong, forgotten familiarity as well.

Indulgence

Nostalgia

I can't count the number of times I walk around a bookstore like Barnes or Borders and I'm literally tingling with anticipation. God, I absolutely love bookstores. The soft, over-stuffed leather chairs, my some-sort-of-iced-vanilla-latte, that entire parade of people, all different sizes and shapes and colors rummaging around in some form of intellectual/creative cliche. I can sit in the coffee-shop cafe and with absolutely no shame, bask in that smooth, rich, trendy coffee-atmosphere. I succumb eagerly and willfully to the mass marketing and the terrors of Starbucksology and feel completely, wonderfully at home.

Every time I walk into a bookstore it's like walking into a treasure trove. I suppose that makes me a nerd of some sort, but usually I'm enjoying myself far too greatly to care very much as to what kind of nerd that is. The only thought that vexes me to any degree is what book to read first.

Speaking of which...I was recommended to a novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, by a good friend a few months back. Since then I have in turn recommended this book to numerous other people, one of whom started reading it recently. Our conversations have whipped up some of that good ol' nostalgia and I'm recalling again just how much I was...entraptured by that book.
It wasn't just the poignant spin on romance, on love beyond love, beyond time, beyond strength and impossibilities, and it wasn't just the intricate details the author so painstakingly thought out that drew me in. What appealed to me the most, that wholeheartedly captured me and drowned me in its pages was the author's ability to weave absolutely beautiful, passionate moments that dotted the entire novel. I love how she writes with such honest, uncompromising, and at times a hauntingly sorrowful beauty that in the midst of all the Complications and Obstacles of life, presents a very simple, infinitly strong Love that pulses and throbs with all the desperate heartache of two people who will not and cannot let go of one another. She takes Love and dissects it down to its intricate core, and finds that when all the pieces are cut apart and laid down and minutely examined, there exists nothing but a simple, honest, undeniable love that is not great in its perfection, but great in its unrelenting passion.

It's a story about two people who desperately and fiercly love each other not because of the circumstances that bring them together, but inspite of the ones that try to keep them apart.

Great book.