Micro Moments of Love by Barbara Frederickson

It’s time to upgrade our view of love. First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force. As for all positive emotions, the inner feeling love brings you is inherently and exquisitely pleasant -- it feels extraordinarily good, the way a long, cool drink of water feels when you’re parched on a hot day. Yet far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you -- what lies beyond your skin -- relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others -- really see them, wholeheartedly -- springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force.  And the new take on love that I want to share with you is this: Love blossoms virtually any time two or more people -- even strangers -- connect over a shared positive emotion, be it mild or strong. Odds are, if you were raised in a Western culture, you think of emotions as largely private events. You locate them within a person’s boundaries, confined within their mind and skin. When conversing about emotions, your use of singular possessive adjectives betrays this point of view. You refer to ‘my anxiety,’ ‘his anger,’ or ‘her interest.’ Following this logic, love would seem to belong to the person who feels it. Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people -- within interpersonal transactions -- and thereby belong to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily.  More than any other positive emotion, then, love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within connections. Perhaps most challenging of all, love is neither lasting nor unconditional. The radical shift we need to make is this: Love, as your body experiences it, is a micro-moment of connection shared with another.  And decades of research now shows that love, seen as these micro-moments of positive connection, fortifies the connection between your brain and your heart and makes you healthier.  [...]  It can seem surprising that an experience that lasts just a micro-moment can have any lasting effect on your health and longevity. Yet there’s an important feedback loop at work here, an upward spiral between your social and your physical well-being. That is, your micro-moments of love not only make you healthier, but being healthier also builds your capacity for love. Little by little, love begets love by improving your health. And health begets health by improving your capacity for love. --Barbara Frederickson, in Love

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet 147 by William Shakespeare

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

She Walks In Beauty by Lord Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Life in a Love by Robert Browning

Escape me?
Never—
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And baffled, get up to begin again,—
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound,
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope drops to ground
Than a new one, straight to the selfsame mark,
I shape me—
Ever
Removed!

उत्तर दो रघुनंदन

सीतामढ़ी के मंदिर में - माँ सीता की प्रतिमा

हे आर्य पुत्र मेरी 
शंका का समाधान करो 
मै धरा -नंदिनी सीता आज तुमसे एक प्रश्न पूछती हूँ
वो पुत्र तुम ही हो न
जिसने पिता के वचन हेतु
चौदह साल का बन गमन
सहर्ष स्वीकारा परन्तु
पत्नी को दिए सात वचन
तुम कैसे भूल गये
हे राघव तुम भले ही
मात्रपितृ भक्त हो
अनुकरणीय भ्राता भी
परन्तु क्या तुम
उपमेय पति हो ?
अपनी आसन्नप्रसवा पत्नी को
बन भेज कर तुमने किस -
मर्यादा का पालन किया
जो तुम्हारे ही वंशज को
अपने रक्त मांस से पोस रही थी
उसे बन की कठोर जीवन शैली
सौपते हुए तुम्हारा ह्रदय नहीं कांपा
तुममें इतना भी साहस न था
कि उसे उसका अपराध बता कर
स्वयं छोड़ आते --परन्तु
लघु भ्राता द्वारा भेज तुमने
अपना अपराध बोध तो
स्वयं ही सिद्ध कर दिया-
अयोध्या नरेश ये कैसा न्याय है ?
कैसी मर्यादा है मर्यादापुरुषोत्तम ?
अब क्या कहूँ --नहीं कहूँगी कुछ
मै अनुगामिनी हूँ तुम्हारी --
हे रघुवीर बन गमन के समय
तुम्हारे साथ आने का निर्णय मेरा था
पतिधर्म में कौन सी कमी रह गई थी
जो मेरी अग्नि परीक्षा ली तुमनें
हे राघव दुःख और कठिन परीक्षा की
घड़ी में छाया की भाँती साथ रही
अपनी ही अनुगामिनी को
धोबी के मात्र दो बोलों पे त्याग दिया
जाओ दशरथंनंदन मै जनकनंदिनी वसुधापुत्री
सीता तुम्हे छमा करती हूँ जानते हो आर्य पुत्र
मै धरा की पुत्री हूँ माता का धैर्य है मुझमें
तुम्हारे पुत्र तुम्हे सौंप --मै अपनी माँ की गोद में
विश्राम करती हूँ --हे रघुवीर तुम्हे त्याग कर
सदा के लिए --बस यही प्रतिकार है मेरा
मुझे ज्ञात है तुम अनुत्तरित ही रहोगे - Divya Shukla

Her Voice by Oscar Wilde

The wild bee reels from bough to bough 
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing, 
Now in a lily-cup, and now 
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering;
Sit closer love: it was here I trow
I made that vow,
Swore that two lives should be like one
As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,-
It shall be, I said, for eternity
'Twixt you and me!
Dear friend, those times are over and done;
Love's web is spun.
Look upward where the poplar trees
Sway and sway in the summer air,
Here in the valley never a breeze
Scatters the thistledown, but there
Great winds blow fair
From the mighty murmuring mystical seas,
And the wave-lashed leas.
Look upward where the white gull screams,
What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
On some outward voyaging argosy,
Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
How sad it seems.
Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost,
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may.

And there is nothing left to do
But to kiss once again, and part,
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
I have my beauty,-you your Art,
Nay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
Like me and you