Date a girl who reads.

"You should date a girl who reads.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes." 

— Rosemarie Urquico

Love.

Take love.  What in the world are we doing?!  If we are evolutionary beings, I guarantee that nature would have taken one look at love and ran away as fast as it could and never have looked back.  There are much easier and less disastrous ways to keep us attached to one person, if that was the ultimate goal.  Why would anyone in their right mind spend their entire existence fighting for something that 99% of the time only ends up crushing their bones to dust.  To anyone who has ever had a broken heart or unrequited love, they know this bone crushing agony oh too well.  And they must seriously question the statement, "It is better to have loved, than never to have loved at all" after such devastating events.  It must have been the person who's "never loved at all" that came up with such a thought.  But the mystery is that it wasn't at all.  For someone who's blessed enough to have truly loved, there is nothing greater.  It's the ultimate drug that awakens desires you never knew existed until you've tasted of it.  And once the dark places of your soul have even the smallest flickering light of love, the absence of it causes the walls of your being to tremble until the light once again is ignited . Which is why the light of love is blinding.  When we are filled with love we want to hope all things, believe all things and we certainly try to endure all things, no matter how dysfunctional or destructive.  Why?  Because we are created for the highest purpose to love and be loved.  If we have all the riches and pleasures of this world, if we travel and discover every hidden place, if we change and save all of humanity, but don't have love, it is worthless.  We gain nothing and we leave nothing behind.  We are emptier than when we started because we come to the end of the road and realize nothing else satisfies but love.  It is everything good and pure in this life.  But love never comes easy. What great thing ever has?  Though love feels like the miracle, what is even more the feat is sustaining it.  Love is a fight, and a well worthy one at that. But it is never kept without that fight.  There is a force against us and all of hell will try to keep us from it.  If you're not ready to fight, it is over before it ever began. Love never stood a chance. Your zeal and courage must be greater than your fears and then love will prevail.

die to live

If I have learned nothing else in the last ten months it is that death is the most painful and glorious process God created- and the most necessary. The death of our physical bodies is the only thing in this life that we can be sure of and with God everything is a glimpse into something far greater. We are born only to someday die, and we live on only to die daily to ourselves. “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed.  For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that His life may be revealed in our mortal body” 2 Cor. 4:10-12. But what is the point in dying to everything that our flesh desires? If we really desire Jesus above everything else, then the death of ourselves should be one of the first things we seek. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ who lives in me. The life I live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” Gal 2:20.


In Andrew Murray’s book, “Humility” he explains that humility is the root of everything good. I can’t serve without humility, I can’t love without humility, and I can’t truly live without humility. And humility is the knowledge of my infinite nothingness and dying to myself so that God can be everything. God can never be great enough, and I can never be small enough. “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself” Gal 6:2-3. For even Jesus, the Son of God had to walk in the deepest humility of all, making Himself nothing, so His Father would be glorified. Jesus said of Himself, “The son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing” Jn 5:19.  All sin begins with thinking we are something apart from God, when we are nothing. The fall of Satan was rooted in pride and the fall of man was rooted in pride.  Pride infiltrates and infects all we do, think, or say.  It is the root of all that separates us from God and therefore should be the first thing we seek to destroy.  This is by seeking Jesus’ humility above all else and choosing at any cost to take it upon ourselves.  “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion…Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves…Your attitude should be the same as Jesus… who, being in very nature GOD, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself NOTHING, taking the very nature of a servant…he humbled himself and became obedient to death.” Php 2:1-7


The beauty of it though is that it is all unto love. Infinite, jealous, glorious love. If we truly had a glimpse into this love and then into eternity, we would realize the futility of this life, how small and incomparable the time is here compared with the age to come with our Jesus. With every revelation of His love and into eternity, we are more apt to not only accept suffering, pain, and the death of ourselves, but rejoice in its coming. Even to long after more ways to die to ourselves. Our flesh is gripping at every chance for self-preservation, but our spirits are crying out for God to fill every part of our being. We only have this life to give. After this short time we will never again get to choose Him in the midst of chaos, confusion, pain, and the hardest of all, in our pride. God allows us to be apart of something so much greater, if we choose it. As Jesus was preparing for His own death, He spoke with His closest friends and told them, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am my servant also will be” Jn. 12:23-26.  Jesus is speaking of the life He lived of selflessness, humility, and love and of the death He is about to endure. He then goes on to say, “Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say?!  Father save me from this hour??  No!  It was for this very reason I came [to die and give Himself up for us!]…Father, glorify Your name.” We will never regret giving more and then more and more to Jesus, the One who gave up everything for us. We will only regret even the smallest things we still try to hold onto. The glory that awaits us far surpasses our momentary troubles. Where else do you have to go, who else do you have to turn to? Why else are you here? It’s all for Him. Become nothing, so He can become everything. Die to everything, and you will never be so alive. “What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish [trash!], that I may gain Christ and be found in him…I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead [His life!]” Php. 3:8-11.

“Through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as imposters; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” -2 Cor. 6:8-10

Php 1:23

I feel like a wild dragon, just beating against the walls of my cage, roaring to be set free. To soar into the depths of the sea and to the heights of the heavens. This world is my confine and my hope is your reality. You've placed in me a knowledge of the outside world but you're keeping me here for these people. They’ve died inside this box, they've clipped their own wings and have forgotten what it's like to fly. I can hear you whispering to me from the outside and I'll continue to whisper to them, until you fling wide the doors, break our chains and set us free. We'll be made whole again, we'll soar with you,  forever.

Sigur Ros "Glosoli"