The Measure of My Days

This little book written by Florida Scott-Maxwell (1883-1979)  literally fell off the shelf into my hands when I reached for another one.  It said, "Read me, Read me!" the way books do.

Love is something we all want, above all, she says--but love is not love without trust and honesty, is it?  Every love teaches us things of value, but sometimes the difficulties overshadow the love.

Here is what Florida Scott-Maxwell has to say about love and hate:

I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well.  Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law.  It can seem like truth. But what is truth? Oh this mysterious world in which we know nothing, nothing.  At times love seems clarity, beyond judgment. But this is a place that can also be reached alone, an impersonal place, found and lost again.  

Love is asked to carry intolerable burdens, not seen from outside.  Love can be hard service, giving your all, and it may be finding your all. It is sometimes a discipline allowing you to do the impossible. It may be your glimpse of transcendence.....But it is all the pains as well, the small pains as well as the great. It is baffling to be loved by someone incapable of seeing you. It is pain to have your love claimed as a cloak that another may hide from himself. 

(The bold print indicates what I underlined and wrote WOW to when I first read this book a few years ago.)

Love may have blind facets in its all-seeing eyes, but it is we who are blind to what we ask it to bear. Of course it is the heights and the depths, the follies and the glories, but being loving is not always love, and hate can be more cleansing.  Why are love and hate near each other, opposite, and alike, and quickly interchangeable?

Love is honored and hate is condemned, but love can do harm. It can soften, distort, maintain the unreal and cover hate.  Hate can be nature's way of forcing honesty on us, and finding the strength to follow a truer way....Hate is part of truth.

When I was young, I knew inside me what I could and could not accept, but I could not express opposition.  I had to bear the unacceptable a long time until I hated it.  Then I could protest but with the scalding accompaniment of hate....Heat brings change, and so anger can be the right weapon if one is clean enough to use it.