The Dean’s Blog

At the end of the week, like so many others, I will fall into the tradition of thinking about love and the people I love.  So, amidst the planning for dinners, gatherings, candy deliveries, and sweet words, I thought I’d get my love note out early.  Instead of tagging you with 25 things about me, here are my quick reflections during this season of love.

I encourage you to read of love lost and love found in the Washington Post Magazine.  Last Sunday, the Post put out a Valentine’s Fiction issue — I love it and hope you will too.

I need to re-read Love’s Labour’s Lost – this is a great week to start.  I love the classics — Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

(Image from the Push My Hat Back weblog)

Seems out of place, but I also like to revisit great socail game-changers and their thoughts about how love has real power and can change us and the world.  One of my favorite points of discussion from Mohandas Gandhi:

Fear and love are contradictory terms. Love is reckless in giving away, oblivious as to what it gets in return. Love wrestles with the world as with the self and ultimately gains mastery over all other feelings. My daily experience, as of those who are working with me, is that every problem lends itself to solution if we are determined to make the law of truth and non-violence the law of life. For truth and non-violence are, to me, faces of the same coin. The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not. Just as a scientist will work wonders out of various applications of the law of nature, even so a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work greater wonders.

Finally, take a listen to Al Green’s L.O.V.E. I hope love and peace are with you this week and forever.