Lighthouse Love Quotes

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.

Kindness is universal. Sometimes being kind allows others to see the goodness in humanity through you. Always be kinder than necessary.

God built lighthouses to see people through storms. Then he built storms to remind people to find lighthouses.

It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.

sometimes life isn’t worth the pain. i’m going for a swim. goodbye, my love.

He slept that night thinking of loves and lighthouses. That one love might shine to bring all loves home.

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

I thought that the light-house looked lovely as hope, That star on life's tremulous ocean.

You read all kinds of books and see all kinds of movies about the man who is obsessed and devoted, whose focus is a single solid beam, same as the lighthouse and that intense, too. It is Heathcliff with Catherine. It is a vampire with a passionate love stronger than death. We crave that kind of focus from someone else. We'd give anything to be that "loved." But that focus is not some soul-deep pinnacle of perfect devotion - it's only darkness and the tormented ghosts of darkness. It's strange, isn't it, to see a person's gaping emotional wounds, their gnawing needs, as our romance? We long for it, I don't know why, but when we have it, it is a knife at our throat on the banks of Greenlake. It is an unwanted power you'd do anything to be rid of. A power that becomes the ultimate powerlessness.

they told me my job description but i think i’ve got it wrong. they said i was supposed to man the lighthouse and save lost ships from going down. but every time i saw the ships i forgot about the light. i dove headfirst into the sea and swam to save their life.   i drowned us both in the process; the ships never found the shore. i ended up helping less when i meant to be helping more.   i think when they told me to save people with my light, i mistook their words and tried to save people with my life.   i know i should have turned the light on, i know i should have taken their advice, but i don’t know what love is if it is not sacrifice.

Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

Lately, their love had been reduced to yellow emojis.

A song of despair The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the dwarves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness. and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief my desire was to you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

The lighthouse lantern had been burning a lifetime, a beacon for love’s safe return. For a man who had, in fact, made it back home, just not alive.

She used to tell me how the moment I was born, she knew she had found her light in the dark. That one lighthouse that, no matter what, was always up. Lighting up the night and signaling her way home.

There is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

Some people are destined to be a lighthouse for a lost comrade.

In the sea of life, you are my lighthouse, guiding me safely to the shore of your love.

Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also absolutely beautiful and necessary.

Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene or meeting of people (all now gone and separate),one of those globed compact things over which thought lingers, and love plays. ~Lily Briscoe

The love within them shone as brightly as the lighthouse beam on the darkest, stormiest night. It broke through her confusion and heartache and filled her with a warm glow.

Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.

Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers?

That people should love like this, that Mr. Bankes should feel this for Mrs. Ramsay (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting.

It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.

Core values serve as a lighthouse when the fog of life seems to leave you wandering in circles; when you encounter that moment where every decision is a tough one and no choice seems to clearly be the better choice.

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? Or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love

like a simple little lighthouse, my true ideal is to just be...having no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace

May the stars forever guide us, and may this lighthouse bring us home.

his stubble was cut smooth. he smelled of aftershave, dry deodorant and sex-tarnished bedsheets. those eyes--grey, strong, inlaid beneath a firm brow that displayed such hate and SUCH love--they seduced her every time... but not tonight.

There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared. [...] He was not "in love" of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many.

It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” from her essay, On Being Ill

Be like the sun who fell in love with the moon and shared all his light. Be like the moon who became a lighthouse to guide others in the night. Be like the mountains who were once hills that wanted to kiss the sky. Be like the trees who are firmly grounded but dream up high. Be like the waves who play and tickle each other endlessly. Be like the children who enjoy and live in the present entirely. Be like the God who equally loves everything and everyone. And be like the love who brought compassion when she visited the sun.

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets towards your oceanic eyes. There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames, its arms turning like a drowning man's. I send out red signals across your absent eyes that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse. You keep only darkness, my distant female, from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges. Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes. The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you. The night gallops on its shadowy mare shedding blue tassels over the land.

Love is the lighthouse that guides us through life's storms.

You were a pain, then. You still are. You’re just a different kind of pain to me.

And… it’s like all my life I’ve been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I’m not a tower at all. I’m a lighthouse.

So I was a stone in the sea. Gravity gave up on keeping me above the surface. I did not try to swim and so I sank to the bottom with no will to turn back. ”I’m tired,” I told him. ”I’m done”. But he wouldn’t let me and he held me up even on his hardest days and he was a lighthouse when all I saw was darkness.

Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.

Hope is a duty. Hope is our reality. Shelley says so and he believes it so, but for me the light has gone out. The light inside and the light outside. I have no lantern and no lighthouse. I am at sea in waves too high and the rocks wreck me.

The lake froze so far out that we could even walk on it past the lighthouse where my father had once ridden his tricycle into. And what was more, the water froze so high and the snow piled on top of it such that we could walk right up to the top of the lighthouse, stand on it like it was part of some lost civilization underneath us, Gus’s arm hooked around my neck as he hummed, It’s June in January, because I’m in love.

But she used to tell me how the moment I was born, she knew she had found her light in the dark. That one lighthouse that, no matter what, was always up. Lighting up the night and signaling her way home. And as a kid, I thought that was either corny or very dramatic.

Skip had loved that lighthouse—and all it symbolized. Light in the darkness. Guidance through turbulent waters. Salvation for the floundering. Hope for lost souls.

If reality is what looms, love is what pervades...

The moon is the lighthouse of love, and as changing as a woman's mind.

Shine the light of awareness on your disempowering beliefs and choose to substitute them with empowering beliefs. This way you will choose love over fear and your path to purpose becomes clear.

My mind, a Venn diagram. You, the overlap and the intersect; a pulsating glimmer—omnipresent, a lighthouse with its glowing breath. You are the stone that skirts the river, that skips along its crystal plane; a surface skimmed by concentric shimmer, and trembles with the touch of rain. You are worlds that spin in orbit, a star who rose and fell; infinity summoned for audit— a penny toss in the wishing well.

...she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored?

You don't have to tell me a damn thing, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.' My voice is a rumble in my chest, an oath in the night. 'But whatever you want to give me, I'll take.' I'm not just talking about right now-or just about her secrets. If she needs someone to hate, let it be me. If she needs someone to listen, I will hang on her every word. If she wants to scream but can't, I will scream my own throat raw. And if all I can do for her is make it across these damn rocks to that lighthouse, then I don't care home much it hurts.

He turned and saw her. Ah! She was lovely, lovelier now than ever he thought. But he could not speak to her. He could not interrupt her. He wanted urgently to speak to her now that ames was gone and she was alone at last. But he resolved, no; he would not interrupt her. She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her. And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame, and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect her.

She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, "Let me come with you," and he laughed. He meant yes or no - either perhaps. But it was not his meaning - it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her...

Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this–love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

The ocean, vast and tumultuous, reminded Stacey of everything that separated him from Anneliese. The plight was like Saint Exupéry walking across the desert. It was James Ramsay trying to get to the lighthouse. It seemed so close, yet such an immense distance to cover.

We would get lost sometimes because everybody does. But that’s why you travel with the people you love. Because no matter how far off course you get, they’re always there to guide you home. They’re your lighthouse on the shore. Your star in the evening sky. Your True North.

Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored?

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.

Our eyes meet. And…it’s like all my life I’ve been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I’m not a tower at all. I’m a lighthouse. It’s like waking up. I am incandescent.

Same day, 11 o'clock p. m..—Oh, but I am tired! If it were not that I had made my diary a duty I should not open it tonight. We had a lovely walk. Lucy, after a while, was in gay spirits, owing, I think, to some dear cows who came nosing towards us in a field close to the lighthouse, and frightened the wits out of us. I believe we forgot everything, except of course, personal fear, and it seemed to wipe the slate clean and give us a fresh start. We had a capital `severe tea' at Robin Hood's Bay in a sweet little oldfashioned inn, with a bow window right over the seaweedcovered rocks of the strand. I believe we should have shocked the `New Woman' with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them! Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest, and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls.

Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, 'Tell your daughter three things.' "Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the world beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse. "Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing on information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. "Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. "Read. Find out what you truly are. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these three I trust.

Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her – who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

He was the love of my new life, a lighthouse I had seen in the distance, the place I needed to get to, to start over, begin again.

You must really love this guy, huh? I mean, to be crying as ugly as you are?

And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one’s ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to great old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit in, “Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper’s hidden the chairs. Do let me find you one!” and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one’s sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole.

The lighthouse was called The Longing. Pitched amidst tessellations of rock black as coke, thrashed for over a hundred years by disconsolate squalls, it needled upwards, spine-straight, a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together. It was lovely in its decrepitude, feathery paint gnawed off by north winds and rust-blazed window frames signatures of use and purpose. -The Lighthouse Witches, C.J. Cooke

Tally had a love-hate relationship with the sea. Today it bordered more on the liked-quite-a-bit side of the scale. She stood on the beach at Lighthouse Point on Belle Island. The waves raced up the gentle slope

What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like water poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored?

Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something criticizing Mrs Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her way, high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.

May the road rise to meet you, May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, The rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of his hand. May God be with you and bless you; May you see your children’s children. May you be poor in misfortune, Rich in blessings, May you know nothing but happiness From this day forward. May the road rise to meet you May the wind be always at your back May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home And may the hand of a friend always be near. May green be the grass you walk on, May blue be the skies above you, May pure be the joys that surround you, May true be the hearts that love you.

No amount of darkness can dim my love for you. I will be your lighthouse to guide you through the night, until you return to the safety of the shore. Our shore. Come back to me, babe. Come back, because I'm not going anywhere…without you.

Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge,

He turned and saw her. Ah! She was lovely, lovelier now than ever he thought. But he could not speak to her. He could not interrupt her. He wanted urgently to speak to her now that James was gone and she was alone at last. But he resolved, no; he would not interrupt her. She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her.

Love was about navigating the black spaces of the universe. Love was a lighthouse at the edge of the world. Love—a smile crossed my face as I remembered months before, how simple it had been, how hard, trying to understand my power. Love was a bridge.

Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her – who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

We are a short poem in a endless emptiness page, words are lighthouses that ignites and struggle to deliver light to the dark edges of the infinite, and mystic sounds struggle to give voice to the unlived beings, to bore a young soul to the gate of birth.

The Bishop family was not wealthy. The Bishop family had no investments to speak of or squabble over, no shares to gain interest from, no inheritance--either present or forthcoming--to preoccupy or estrange them. The Bishop family had no priceless works of art, no inestimable and enviable heirlooms to fill their rooms. But the Bishop family had each other, bound together in the dearest loyalty, the deepest love, protective one of the other unto death. It was this spirit that permeated the little cottage by the lighthouse night and day...

Justine refused to risk the pain that real closeness could bring. She’d been with her twin brother when he died, and the love she felt for him had turned into agony. Caught up in her own grief, Olivia had failed to recognize the devastating effect his death had had on her daughter.

for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.

I didn’t until I was older and she was diagnosed and the possibility of her leaving us became real. But she used to tell me how the moment I was born, she knew she had found her light in the dark. That one lighthouse that, no matter what, was always up. Lighting up the night and signaling her way home. And as a kid, I thought that was either corny or very dramatic.” A low and humorless chuckle left him. My heart broke all over again for him, hurting and begging me to turn around and give him any comfort I could. But I stayed put. “You must miss her so much.” “I do, every day. When she passed and my nights got a little darker, I started to understand what she’d meant.” That was a loss I hoped I wouldn’t experience in a long time. “But what your dad said—about you having this fire inside, that lightness and life, and how it dulled for a period of time …” He paused, and I swore I heard him swallow. “It just …” He trailed off, as if he was scared of his next words. And Aaron never feared speaking his mind. Aaron was never scared. “You are all that, Catalina. You are light. And passion. Your laughter alone can lift my mood and effortlessly turn my day around in a matter of seconds. Even when it’s not aimed at me. You … can light up entire rooms, Catalina. You hold that kind of power. And it’s because of all the different things that make you who you are. Each and every one of them, even the ones that drive me crazy in ways you can’t imagine. You should never forget that.

But shipwrecks were rarely like that, she’d learned later, proud and upright, perched whimsically on the seafloor. Wrecks were wrecked, sure and violent. Shattered and flattened, rotting edges under sand. There was no lovely way for something meant to conquer the sea to instead be torn apart by it.

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed.

I belong to myself. Always. Eternally. Without question. My own safe house. My own sheltered harbor. I am my own solid ground. I am the lighthouse beacon. I call the ships safely home from sea. I am the North Star and the compass. I am my own port in the wildest storm. I am the spell caster and the spell breaker. I am a witch of alchemy and transformation. I am the pages in the grimoire of knowledge, I am the source of all the magic ever known. I am the kiss that wakes us all from slumber. I am the white horse knight in shining armor. I am my own happily ever after fairytale godmother. I am my own rest stop on the longest journey of living. The final destination on every treasure map I will ever need. I am my own primary relationship, my own till death do us part. I am my own center and saving grace, my own best-kept secret. I am the lineage of wisdom itself, the home of my own belonging. I am my own. And my own. And always my own.

You never stop thinking you might have beaten it somehow, and there were moments when we thought we had. Your husband can be dead years, and you can’t stop thinking how you might have beaten it. Or how they could have left ten minutes earlier, or the next morning. Or that damn lighthouse could have flickered through the fog.

Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.

Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty.

The sciences, pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire, are shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief; the educated classes and states are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy. The world has never been more worldly, never poorer in love and goodness. The educated classes are no longer lighthouses or refuges in the midst of this turmoil of secularization; they themselves grow daily more restless, thoughtless and loveless. Everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming barbarism. The cultured man has degenerated to the greatest enemy of culture, for he wants lyingly to deny the existence of the universal sickness and thus obstructs the physicians.

„… ce putea fi mai solemn decît dragostea bărbatului pentru femeie, ce putea fi mai impunător și mai impresionant decît acest sentiment care poartă în miezul lui germenii morții; dar, în același timp, acești îndrăgostiți, acești tineri care intră cu ochi strălucitori în vîrtejul amăgirii, te îndemnau să dansezi în jurul lor, bătîndu-ți joc de ei și împodobindu-i cu ghirlande.

i hope for you i think of you as i write these words, the words i want you to keep. and i hope for you.  i hope that you are happy, that you find what you are looking for, i hope that you grow, that you get to know your soul.  i hope Love finds you, and that you learn to savor the bittersweet of life, the rain and sunshine, the winter and spring. i hope there's a lighthouse shining in your sea, stars in your sky, wildflowers in your meadows.

You won't finish that stocking tonight," he said, pointing to her stocking. That was what she wanted---the asperity in his voice reproving her. If he says it's wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right. "No," she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee, "I shan't finish it." And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his look had changed. He wanted something--wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things--she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so--it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt.

Societies sometimes smear Wisdom and her natural, symmetrical beauty. She is at times caked beneath the extreme makeup of dirty politics and yellow journalism. At times she may appear to be the red, far-right extremist to a majority that has drifted too far left - and at other times, the blue, far-left extremist to a majority that has drifted too far right. 'She' is Wisdom, a beacon in the center of hope and a lighthouse to be utilized. She is truth that must be washed by the sea of Love.

Another admission: I am romantic, I dream-up radically impractical journeys just to try and feel or to intuit something from a past that may well have never existed – or not in the way I imagine it. Combined with this I have a tendency towards depressive states. My episodes have never been so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed and face the day, but after my time at the lighthouse and losing the woman whom I thought I loved so much, and drinking to bad effect every night, I felt a shift come on that scared me.

Sitting on the floor with her arm round Mrs. Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything; but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.

After All This" After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of an arm. The tides inside your heart still pull me towards you. After all this, what are these words but mollusk shells a child plays with? What could say more than the eloquence of last night’s constellations? or the storm anchored by its own flashes behind the far mountains? I remember the way your body wavers under my touch like the northern lights. After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can hear the footsteps of the stars. How can these words ever reveal the secret that waits in their sleeping light? The words that walk through my mind say only what has already passed. Beyond, the swallows are still knitting the wind. After a while, the smokebush will turn to fire. After a while, the thin moon will grow like a tear in a curtain. Under it, a small boy kicks a ball against the wall of a burned out house. He is too young to remember the war. He hardly knows the emptiness that kindles around him. He can speak the language of early birds outside our window. Someday he will know this kind of love that changes the color of the sky, and frees the earth from its moorings. Sometimes I kiss your eyes to see beyond what I can imagine. Sometimes I think I can speak the language of unborn stars. I think the whole earth breathes with you. After all this, these words are all I have to say what is impossible to think, what shy dreams hide in the rafters of my heart, because these words are only a form of touch, only tell you I have no life that isn’t yours, and no death you couldn’t turn into a life.

BESTIARY " charybdis: when i suck in / i make deadly / whirlpools / ask anyone who’s managed / to climb out / alive dragon: patrol or pillage / he exhales and a whole village / burns / iron scaled sentry / guardian of the ivory / tower i wrap my legs around / everyone thinks / he’s a brute / but for me / he lifts his breast plate / for me he welcome the quiver / and the arrow’s teeth. golem: take his hair in your hands / his dead / skin cells / his discarded undergarments / take them / and make of them a new boy this effigy / his likeness and nothing / like him / breathe life into its clenched carapace // my god / i think i saw it / move medusa: when i saw / my face / reflected in terror / in his eyes / i turned to stone / or a pillar of salt watching my village burn / he was the village burning / maybe that’s a different story / maybe in the end only the snakes wept siren: he cries / and i / lashed to the mast of a ship / steer my body toward the sound / sheets bound around wrists and ankles tears make grief / a lighthouse you wear / when i hear him a huge wood wheel turns in my stomach / and i break / open on / his jagged coast werewolf: there are many words for transformation / metamorphosis metaphor / medication / go to sleep / beside the man you love wake up next to a dog / maybe the moon brought it out of him hound hungry for blood / maybe its your fault / or maybe it was there inside him / howling all along

The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arts, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the new town rose higher than lighthouses into the clear February sky. It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to a scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago.

He wanted something—wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things—she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so—it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt. Was there no crumb on his coat? Nothing she could do for him? Getting up she stood at the window with the reddish-brown stocking in her hands, partly to turn away from him, partly because she did not mind looking now, with him watching , at the Lighthouse. For she knew that he had turned his head as she turned; he was watching her. She knew that he was thinking, You are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful. Will you not tell me just for once that you love me? He was thinking that, for he was roused, what with Minta and his book, and it's being the end of the day and their having quarrelled about going to the Lighthouse. But she could not do it; she could not say it. Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying any thing she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)— 'Yes, you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow.' She had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again.

Gennie,you should have told me you hadn't been with a man before." And how was it possible, he wondered, that she'd let no man touch her before? That he was the first...the only. "Why?" she said flatly,wishing he would go, wishing she had the strength to leave. "It was my business." Swearing,he shifted,leaning over her. His eyes were dark and angry, but when she tried to pull away,he pinned her. "I don't have much gentleness," he told her, and the words were unsteady with feeling. "But I would have used all I had,I would have tried to find more,for you." When she only stared at him, Grant lowered his forehead to hers. "Gennie..." Her doubts,her fears,melted at that one softly murmured word. "I wasn't looking for gentleness then," she whispered. Framing his face with her hands, she lifted it. "But now..." She smiled, and watched the frown fade from his eyes. He dropped a kiss on her lips, soft, more like whisper,then rising, lifted her into his arms. Gennie laughed at the feeling of weightlessness and ease. "What're you doing now?" "Taking you inside so you can warm up, dry off and make love with me again-maybe not in that order." Gennie curled her arms around his neck. "I'm beginning to like your ideas. What about our clothes?" "We can salvage what's left of them later." He pushed open the door of the lighthouse. "We won't be needing them for quite a while." "Definitely like your ideas." She pressed her mouth against his throat.

That was the terrifying thing about love: he felt that he had handed over the key to his mind and she could wander in at will.

It took Doc longer to go places than other people. He didn’t drive fast and he stopped and ate hamburgers very often. Driving up to Lighthouse Avenue he waved at a dog that looked around and smiled at him. In Monterey before he even started, he felt hungry and stopped at Herman’s for a hamburger and beer. While he ate his sandwich and sipped his beer, a bit of conversation came back to him. Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, “You love beer so much. I’ll bet some day you’ll go in and order a beer milk shake.” It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn’t let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn’t forget it. He finished his sandwich and paid Herman. He purposely didn’t look at the milk shake machines lined up so shiny against the back wall. If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn’t known—they might call the police. A man with a beard

Your mother loves you." "I know that. But she still thinks it's forty years ago, back when epilepsy was some nasty little secret you weren't supposed to talk about." "Yes," Aunt Zee said. "And now we have progressed to the point where people post pictures of their colonoscopies on Facebook." Sandy choked on his coffee, and Aunt Zee patted his hand until he got over it. He went back to eating, but with a little smile at the corner of his mouth. "It's better to be open about things, even if some people go too far," Lori said.

he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

In the sea of information, crafting concise and coherent books is our lighthouse, capturing the essence amidst the waves.

And do you mean to say he had peace and quiet with you there?’ said the driver teasingly. ‘Well, well!’ ‘It’s not so quiet there really,’ said Tinker. ‘The waves make such a noise, and so does the wind. But my father didn’t really notice those. He only notices things like bells ringing, or people talking, or somebody knocking at the door. Things like that drive him mad. He loved the lighthouse.’ ‘Well – I hope you enjoy yourselves there,’ said the driver. ‘It’s not my cup of tea – hearing nothing but waves and gulls crying. Better you than me!’ They descended the other side of the hill and the lighthouse was no longer to be seen. ‘Soon be there now,’ said Tinker. ‘Mischief, will you like to be at the lighthouse again? How quickly you could go up the spiral staircase and down – do you remember?’ The car swept down almost to the edge of the sea. The lighthouse was now plainly to be seen, a good way out from the shore. A small boat bobbed at a stone jetty, and Tinker pointed it out with a scream of joy. ‘That’s the boat we had – the one that took us to and from the lighthouse when the tide was in! It’s called Bob-About, and it does bob about too.’ ‘Is it yours?’ asked George, rather jealously.

I want to be that person for him, I want to be the one who keeps him going during this difficult time. I want to be his lighthouse keeper ... but it's hard. Harder than I thought.

Love is like a durian: judge not its spiky exterior and stinky smell, for its flesh is bittersweet and tasty. And that probably applies to humans as well.

If I wish to find True Love, I have to awaken the True Love within and become the embodiment of True Love.

True Love is Supreme Perfect Enlightenment.

Loving yourself means accepting yourself just as you are, flaws and all. Loving-kindness begins with forgiveness and letting go of past preoccupations of perceived imperfections.

Is it a love letter?’ Esther asked again. ‘No,’ I stammered. ‘ I … I … don’t think so.’ ‘Don’t you know what it says?’ She was surprised. ‘So it’s a secret code? Isn’t that a bit dangerous?’ I wiped my palms on my skirt: I knew what she was implying, and took a step towards her. ‘Are you calling my sister a spy?’ Esther Jenkins slowly smiled. ‘I don’t think I mentioned a sister, did I?’ I realised then what I’d done: I’d put my size five foot right in it.

In my head I’d pictured her (Queenie) as tall, like Gloria, with a warm, smiley face. Being Sukie’s penpal, she was bound to be the fun-loving, lipstick-wearing, jitterbugging type, who’d be friendly and welcoming toward us. It was bewildering that no one in the group fitted her description. These women didn’t even smile. They were pointing at us evacuees – discussing us – like they were choosing what cake to have for tea. ‘I’m looking for help with milking my Jerseys,’ said a woman with large front teeth. ‘Someone who’s not shy of getting up at dawn.’ The older kids seemed to think this a right lark, especially the boys, most of whom had probably never been near a live cow before. Within moments, they were falling over themselves to volunteer. ‘Don’t take all the best ones, Poll,’ another woman complained, which started them off bickering over who’d get the strongest boys. It wasn’t exactly fun, hovering like a spare part while everyone else got picked. There was no sign of anyone who might be Queenie, either. I grew anxious again, wondering how much longer we’d have to wait. Cliff leaned his head sleepily on my soldier.

But we’re Sukie’s brother and sister,’ I protested. ‘You’re supposed to be her friend!’ Queenie looked surprised. ‘Me? I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘You’ve written to…’ I trailed off hopelessly. There was no point in arguing any more. Queenie has made up her mind. ‘Well, I don’t trust Esther Jenkins,’ I muttered, as much to myself as anyone. ‘And I bet she’ll not be as quick doing the deliveries, either.’ Queenie gave me a withering look. ‘For your information, Esther’s moved house, city and country more times than you’ve had hot dinners. I don’t think she’d manage it again. At least you two have each other.’ Glancing at Cliff, all I felt was more worry, not less. I hadn’t got the hang of this ‘big sister’ lark – you only had to look at Cliff’s split lip to see my attempt at looking after him wasn’t exactly going well. ‘All Esther’s anger, all that bluster – it’s just a front.’ Queenie went on. ‘Behind it she’s a smashing girl. You need to give her a chance.’ ‘She said horrible things about my sister!’ I insisted, though I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Because I’d started the fight, hadn’t I? I’d been the angry one – Esther had almost tried to apologise. Queenie stopped. ‘You’ve heard of the Kindertransport, have you?’ ‘Some Jewish kids joined our school from Europe,’ I said. ‘But I don’t see what –’ ‘Esther was one of them,’ Queenie interrupted. ‘Not at your school but another one in London. She’s a Jewish refugee.’ ‘Well, she as good as called Sukie a spy!’ I pointed out. Queenie ignored my comment. ‘Esther’s had a terrible time of it. Everyone she loves has either died or disappeared, or failing that, lives in another country. Imagine what that feels like, can you?’ I swallowed miserably. The thing was I could imagine it – bits of it, anyway – and I felt ashamed, which didn’t improve my temper. ‘That doesn’t excuse what she did to Cliff’s lip,’ I mumbled, though really I was cross with myself. After what I’d overheard about kosher meat, I should have realised she was a Kindertransport child. But I didn’t think, did I? Instead, I’d grabbed her by the hair. What sort of person was I turning into to be so bitter? So angry? Queenie set off walking again. ‘That lip’ll heal in no time. Now hurry up and stop dawdling.’ Glancing sideways at Cliff, I felt a funny sensation in my chest. His lip looked horrid now but he would recover – Queenie was right. At least he was here, my living, breathing, sticky-handed brother. I was pretty lucky, all things considered.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a frivolous man will always love a woman for the most frivolous reasons.

Scripture remains the lighthouse that defines us, gives us hope, and guides us through life’s perilous storms.

Lighthouses Hot summer days ..... or - subtle breezes during Cool summer nights (An apricot sun) ..... or - a platinum moon, with its trailing veil of pale Ecru hued moon dust, the color of eggshell At night, we lay outside on blankets atop blades of grass ..... and - we love and we laugh Only pausing to gaze at the stars (Towards which, we raise up our arms) ..... and - hold out our flicked lighters As if they are, lighthouses Excerpt from: Jacob's Ascent, New Collected Poems by Mekael © Mekael Shane 2024

We both lost pieces of ourselves that day. But as time passed while stuck in that lighthouse, we slowly merged our remaining scattered pieces until we made more sense together than we did apart. There’s no doubt Enzo is worth loving, and though it terrifies me, I’m no longer willing to run away from it.

Lonely Road of Faith [Verse] I see you standing there, a smile that could light up the night Your eyes are calling me, but I know it wouldn’t be right Cause I got one at home who loves me, waiting by the fireside It's a lonely road of faith, that's kept me on the righteous side [Verse 2] Whiskey on my breath, the neon lights, they start to fade The jukebox playing songs of lovers lost and a debt to be paid But her love's a lighthouse, guiding me through this rough tide It's a lonely road of faith, where temptation and truth collide [Chorus] Oh, this heart might wander, but it knows where it belongs A wandering outlaw, but her love keeps me strong Lonely road of faith, where I'm tempted every night But I got one at home who loves me, and she's my guiding light [Verse 3] Wild times and smoky bars, they offer me a fleeting thrill But the thought of her touch keeps me steady, against my will In the dark of night, it's her voice that whispers clear On this lonely road of faith, her love's the one I hold dear [Bridge] The rebel in me fights, for the freedom of my soul But her love's a gentle tether, keeping me whole Every mile that I travel, it's her face that I see On this lonely road of faith, her love will set me free [Chorus] Oh, this heart might wander, but it knows where it belongs A wandering outlaw, but her love keeps me strong Lonely road of faith, where I'm tempted every night But I got one at home who loves me, and she's my guiding light

I know it is easy for me to tell you that you are wanted and needed. It is easy for me to say that you are important. But this is why I say it. Because you are not a burden. You are not a darkness that no person wants to love. You are the lighthouse on top of the hill, warm and beautiful. A heart, guiding people home.

I know what it is to feel like you’ve always got a lighthouse—lighthouses—to guide you back to dry land; to feel the warmth of its beam as it squeezes your hand standing next to you at a funeral of someone you loved.

After supper, Walter and I walked out again to the cliffs… It was so beautiful there, way off down by the sea. The water was that lovely, pale, evening blue, and the sky so red... every few moments another lighthouse, miles away, sent across to us a quick flash that hung for a second like a great star where the water met the sky. When we returned, the car was finished and we went on a trial ride to see if the auto was really in fine working order. As we climbed the hill, the great full, yellow moon came up, and stretched away in a path of shimmering light across the sea. Oh, it was such fun to go flying over fine roads and by shining waters, and through the dark country!

Lights" Lights of churches, monasteries, Christmas trees, and magnificent mosques The dim lights inside warm houses in all the foreign cities where I wandered alone The far away lights of cars driving over bridges I watched from the windows of boring hotels on clear moonlit nights Candle lights and lanterns Lights of little shops in ancient and forgotten alleys Lights of ships sailing to places I will never get to see The lamp post lights on dark rainy winter nights The remote lighthouses and lights of unknown fishermen The glittering lights I have seen in the eyes of kind strangers in cities tourists never go to All these lights I once loved that break me now as they remind me of the magical light that was extinguished in your eyes … [Original poem published in Arabic on November 13, 2024 at ahewar.org]

Your husband wants to be big in your eyes, edify him and lift him up and he will become what he sees in your eyes. He needs to feel the love of the Holy Spirit and see what God can do for him. Love him as Christ loves you with an unconditional love. Step aside so that he might see the miracles as you see them and his heart will be totally changed. You are not your husband’s Holy Spirit, let Jesus do His job. Your husband will come to a place where he loves Jesus with an unfailing love. God has called you to be a woman of excellence, don’t settle for anything less. Sometimes this means humbling yourself and stepping aside so your husband may shine. You came out of the darkness and into the light; you are a beacon on a hill, a lighthouse for many. Love your husband, lift him up, be love to him. When his heart is fully God’s you will have what you seek.

Thank you again for joining me in my journey with the Beacons of Hope. I hope the books have inspired you to visit a lighthouse or two. More than that, I pray you've been both encouraged and inspired to trust in the Giver of Hope. Maybe, like Nathaniel, you've let yourself be haunted by your parents' mistakes. Perhaps you've even started down the same destructive path. I pray God will help you break free of your chains and help you walk in His freedom down a new path. If you're like Abbie, having been hurt or abandoned by the people you thought loved you, I pray that you will recognize that God will never abandon you. He is always there offering you His hope, love, and forgiveness. Please, never forget all that He offers.

Eighty days ago today, I made a pact with myself. A pact that has already begun to change my life in ways I never could have imagined... and it all started with one loving thought.

Heather is a flower that grows in Scotland - it grows on moss-covered bogs and infertile, barren land that can no longer produce vegetation. Even so, wild Heather finds its way to burst through its surroundings so that it can proudly display all of its differing shades of violet to the world... as if to say "Look, here I am! I have grown in all of the places you thought I never could.

I used to wish that I would just wake up one day and the bad feeling in my mind would be gone. The heavy, dark, lingering presence that would tell me the moment I woke up that I was going to dread the day ahead. The one that would tell me it was pointless taking any time to get ready in the morning, because I would never look cute enough anyway. There was no point in dieting, because binging was inevitable. As soon as I felt the cravings rise up in my mind, I could not open the cupboard doors fast enough. All I was doing was looking for ways to feed the self-hate and guilt that had grown deep roots within me, unconsciously giving them sustenance to keep them strong.

Life is really just a synchronistic dance of vibrant energies, emotions, and colours waiting for us to pick up our paintbrushes and finally claim the innate power that we were each born with, so that we may transform our current global tapestry into a masterpiece of magic, art and enchanting love.

With my immeasurable inner light, I have built a rainbow bridge of love all the way back to heaven. I once walked the path of darkness, but with baby steps, I found my way out. At first glimpse, I knew I was in unfamiliar territory – but it was beautiful. I took my light sword and cut away all of the overgrown brush that was initially blocking the path, for I could see the light seeping through. I forged on knowing it was only a matter of time before I would be living and breathing that light. With each issue I forgave that presented itself upon my path, the rainbow bridge took me further and further along, at times taking me through the craziest of storms – which this past year has been proof of.

During the taxi ride on the way to the hotel, I had to laugh to myself as I experienced another special moment between the Universe and I. I have been referring to this trip as a journey into my heart, and have been envisioning Tulum as a physical symbol of heaven on earth. So what do you think is the first song that plays once the taxi driver turns on his tape cassette? As I hear the lyrics fill up the van, I almost can’t believe the synchronicity myself. It is the most perfect, fitting song in the world to be playing at this moment in time: “When you walk into the room You pull me close and we start to move, And we’re spinning with the stars above, And you lift me up in a wave of love… (Wait for it…) Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooh heaven is a place on earth They say in heaven, love comes first We’ll make heaven a place on earth Ooh heaven is a place on earth.

Tonight, after a day full of bad vibrations and thick, dark energy swirling its negative spiral throughout my world, affecting those around me – I could not hold it in any longer. So I cried. I cried for every being on this planet who has ever thought of them self as a victim. I felt the victim consciousness flood my mind tonight, but I knew I was not experiencing it as a personal lesson – it was so that I could hear and feel all of them. I heard their cries, their prayers, and I felt their hopelessness. And after I cried for them – for us, I sent them all my love… for that is what I Am.

My arms are in celebration-mode because it is the first time they have seen the sunlight in years. I hid them shamefully under cardigans and long-sleeve shirts for most of my life, believing that I was doing everyone else a favour by covering up my unlovable body. But for the past month, my favourite cardigan has found a new home. It resides on my couch, or on my laundry hamper, or on my dresser, and maybe back on my arms at night when it gets cool. I no longer use it as a crutch – it’s not protecting me from myself anymore. I am learning to love myself and I know now that love is the only protection I will ever need.

... Do not let your wounds define you – that is not their purpose. The purpose of your wounds is for them to wake you up from the unconscious ways you have been living your life so that you may begin to realize your true potential as a conscious being. As conscious Creators, it is our responsibility to be inquisitive into our wounds and to become aware of why we have created them for our self, accept them as the messengers they are, and then find a way to lovingly live beyond our crippling misperceptions of them.

I found that when my mind started to clear and my thoughts settled, there was a constant flow of information being giving to me about my soul, the universe, truth; really, anything I had a question about. It took about one hundred days to clear the chatter, and now, all I hear is love. Even the things I didn’t like about myself before are being transformed without my even trying! My worries, anxieties, fears, judgements and misperceptions are now so basked in light that I am not even scared of them anymore. There is absolutely nothing to fear and nowhere to go and no one else to be.

If everyone would just realize that it is okay to feel sadness or madness; it is okay to feel all of the dark emotions of the soul. They do not define you or your life, but they are still a part of being human. They come and they go. Let these perceived dark emotions come out and you will see upon truly facing them that they aren’t even that scary!

I know that one day there will be so much love on this planet, it will be overflowing. Healers will prescribe doses of self-love to patients. “Repeat the mantra ‘I love myself’ two hundred times daily.” will be what the new medical prescriptions will read. People will acknowledge the effect their emotions have on their bodies and minds and transmuting negative energy into positive energy will become a regular self-care task for all.

... Courageously sail off into your stormy inner waters to discover the one thing that ignites the spark in your heart – the one thing you were born to do, and once you find that jewel of truth, envision it and create it with all of your heart! You will be lead to your own lighthouse, perched atop a cove overlooking your inner sea; a light at the end of the tunnel that will get you through the darkest storm of all – the journey back to your Self. That lighthouse will always be there, patiently waiting for your conscious arrival so that you too may colour your world with the brightest rays of light and love, projecting it out in as many directions as possible! What are you waiting for? It’s beautiful from up here.

Maybe I’ll take you to a lighthouse and kiss you like in that book about the cranberries everyone has to read in high school.

The love in a marriage turns like the lamp in a lighthouse, leaving you in darkness for long stretches, but it always comes back. I believe that but I can't tell whether it is a thought or a quotation.

It is terrible to lose a loved one... Such sadness doesn't just bruise, then fade away. It devastates. The only way back is to rebuild, stone by stone. And sometimes one hasn't the energy, or the inclination, and one sits among the ruins and waits for something to change. But nothing changes unless we stand up again, and keep picking up the stones.

You're my love, you're my lighthouse; and the sea is rough and in the dark days.

You're my love, you're my lighthouse; and the sea is rough in the dark days.

As you shift, as you personally reach the tipping point where your light and love in the present moment outweigh your fear and insecurity and negativity, you act as a beacon, a signal, an alarm clock or a lighthouse for others who have in spirit chosen to ascend but in the physical realm have not yet begun the process of releasing the lower-vibration frequencies from their life. These lower-vibration frequencies include habits and addictions. They also include thoughts, feelings and emotions, beliefs and intentions, as well as energies.

I love you, Guy, and I think I shall go on loving you, but I’m not in love. I’ve had that and it was a torment, a humiliation and a warning. So now I’m settling for a quiet life with someone I respect and am very fond of and want to spend my life with.

I love this place already," Max says as he gazes at the flying saucer not op of the blue-and-coral-pink building that is South Beach Fish Market. The hole-in-the-wall seafood joint is quirky for sure with the random artwork and sculptures all over the exterior. Giant cartoon renderings of fish and crustaceans in vivid colors adorn the outside, while the roof boasts a silver flying saucer and a lighthouse. "Wait until you taste the food," I say. It's a long wait in line, but I know once we get our meals and find a spot to sit down at one of the outdoor picnic tables, it'll be worth it. As we sit down, I savor the clear summer weather with the sun shining bright above us, offering warmth against the brisk coastal breeze. When the aroma of spices, lemon, and batter hits my nose, my stomach roars. I inhale my fish and chips before Max is even halfway done with his oysters and halibut. "Damn," he says around a mouthful of food. "Sometimes I forget how monstrous your appetite is. I would have never guessed given your size. But every time I watch you eat, I'm reminded all over again." I dig into my clam chowder. "Food is my life. I am not ashamed of it.

I love this place already," Max says as he gazes at the flying saucer on top of the blue-and-coral-pink building that is South Beach Fish Market. The hole-in-the-wall seafood joint is quirky for sure with the random artwork and sculptures all over the exterior. Giant cartoon renderings of fish and crustaceans in vivid colors adorn the outside, while the roof boasts a silver flying saucer and a lighthouse. "Wait until you taste the food," I say. It's a long wait in line, but I know once we get our meals and find a spot to sit down at one of the outdoor picnic tables, it'll be worth it. As we sit down, I savor the clear summer weather with the sun shining bright above us, offering warmth against the brisk coastal breeze. When the aroma of spices, lemon, and batter hits my nose, my stomach roars. I inhale my fish and chips before Max is even halfway done with his oysters and halibut. "Damn," he says around a mouthful of food. "Sometimes I forget how monstrous your appetite is. I would have never guessed given your size. But every time I watch you eat, I'm reminded all over again." I dig into my clam chowder. "Food is my life. I am not ashamed of it.

I never dreamed I’d find a woman as perfectly suited for me as she is. Alexa loves the color green, but not just any green. It’s a mint green—a sea foam green. The shade suits her well because she has always reminded me of the sea. She is calm like the ocean waves. She is a constant source of light, like a lighthouse. She is hard-working, like a ship in the middle of a storm. She is a safe harbor. She is a bright horizon. And I want to sail into the sunset with her.

No one watching their bodies crash together in the waist-deep surf, watching their eyes glow like lighthouses leading stray ships home at last, could have denied the presence of love. It hung between them like a tiny sun, radiating heat, remaking their faces in red and gold.

There you go. Start making music again.” “See, that’s where the problem is.” He lets go of my hand and faces me square on. “I think I’ve forgotten how. I need a lighthouse.” His lips pull into a small smile again, and it’s all I can do not to cry. “Alright then,” I manage. “If music makes you happy, let’s make music.

I’m so confused about who I am,” she admitted to him. “I don’t know anymore.” “I do,” he said. “You’re the girl who wants to be heard. And what she doesn’t know is that while she thinks no one is listening, we all hear her. You’re the girl who loves people by taking care of them, and that’s why you’re having such a hard time right now. You feel that being able to support your family is how you show your love for them. But they all see it anyway. Your strength is in the glow that radiates from you when you walk into a room. It’s magical because we all see it—it blinds us—even if you don’t see it.” He wiped a tear from her cheek, his words hitting her hard. “Your presence is strong enough that you took a man who didn’t think he could ever feel again and made him so excited to face the day that he couldn’t sleep at night. That’s who you are.

His love for this woman kept him grounded, and it gave purpose to his life. Alicia was his lighthouse and his touchstone and his reason for living. She was his everything.

Inclined in the afternoons I throw my sad nets to your ocean eyes. There it strains and blazes in the highest bonfire, my loneliness, flailing arms like a shipwrecked sailor. I make red signals over your eyes, absent, which swell like the sea at the shore of a lighthouse.

With the heat from the fire, the Christmas lights twinkling, and the people she loved next to her, Mia couldn’t help but hope that, despite everything, Christmas might just have a little magic after all.

Your love would be my lighthouse, guiding me through death.

Missing someone you love for an extended period of time can and will lead to madness, every bit as much as a wound that is not cleaned will lead to a festering sore, and thence an illness that spreads throughout the body. The only boundary between desire and obsession is time; if you crave someone long enough, it becomes a need. It becomes your ever-waking thought. The only thing you live for.

I knew intimately how devastating it was to lose someone you love, how your entire life can change – or end – in the blink of an eye.

…before I knew what was happening Finn had cupped my face in his hands and was kissing me, a sensation at once startling and welcome, the closeness of him so natural that all the fear I’d had about men and love and relationships managed to subside, just for that moment.

Jean-Paul, her dear friend, the one who saved her from herself. Jean-paul had given her the best gift in the world--he'd helped Blaine believe she was worthy of love, care, and respect.

You are broken and flawed..and yet you love your son Paul so much zat you pursued him here. It eez zee same with God, who has no brokenness, no flaws, only love. He pursues you. He chases you down. Imagine Grand-Pa. Just imaging how much God loves you. ~ Jean-Paul

God's love eez a mystery, Grand-Pa. It eez unchanging. It eez unconditional.

And I knew what kind of person she was. Even if things changed, if she took up knitting or deep-sea diving or she got married or she adopted fourteen cats and lived in a lighthouse, some things would never change. The years of petty squabbles and sleepovers, first loves dissected, notes passed and secrets shared. It hadn't disappeared because they were over, and it couldn't be undone.

And I knew what kind of person she was. Even if things changed, if she took up knitting or deep-sea diving or she got married or she adopted fourteen cats and lived in a lighthouse, some things would never change. The years of petty squabbles and sleepovers, first loves dissected, notes passed and secrets shared. It hadn't disappeared because they were over, and it couldn't be undone.

for instinctively he knew that any abiding love would have a cost.

...but for now it feels like I am standing on top of a lighthouse, waiting for my love's ship to come in. For a romantic kind of person, it's not an altogether unpleasant feeling, not for now, anyway. It'll be different when it's not so novel anymore, when not seeing him every day is the new normal, but for now, just for now, longing is its own kind of perverse delight.

But she used to tell me how the moment I was born, she knew she had found her light in the dark. That one lighthouse that, no matter what, was always up. Lighting up the night and signaling her way home.

I carry my heart like a crucifix, but I remember once you told me that sorrow can be a blessing too. You told me that what is coming is better than what is gone. You’ve carried my heavy heart to light with ease. I believe in lovely souls ever since burrowing inside of yours. So many storms have ravaged me at sea, but I know those eyes. I know lighthouses guide the rootless home. Maybe you can find light in me as well, and from there find a fire to sleep by. We are here, and we are alive, and that is hope.

Frequently do we meet with the idea that the world is to be converted to Christ by the spread of civilization. Now civilization always follows the Gospel and is, in a great measure, the product of it, but many people put the cart before the horse and make civilization the first cause. According to their opinion, trade is to regenerate the nations! The arts are to ennoble them and education is to purify them. Peace Societies are formed, against which I have not a word to say, but much in their favor. Still, I believe the only efficient Peace Society is the Church of God and the best peace teaching is the love of God in Christ Jesus! The Grace of God is the great instrument for lifting up the world from the depths of its ruin and covering it with happiness and holiness. Christ’s Cross is the Pharos of this tempestuous sea, like the Eddystone lighthouse flinging its beams through the midnight of ignorance over the raging waters of human sin, preserving men from rock and shipwreck, piloting them into the port of peace! Tell it among the heathen—the Lord reigns from the Cross—and as you tell it believe that the power to make the peoples believe it is with God the Father and the power to bow them before Christ is in God the Holy Spirit. Saving energy lies not in learning, nor in wit, nor in eloquence, nor in anything except in the right arm of God who will be exalted among the heathen, for He has sworn that surely all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

disobedience in our heart. When sin controls an area of our life or becomes an accepted part of our life together as a family, it hides the light of Jesus. The Bible is clear that 5 Every home and every family member battles with sin. We all do the very things we know we should not do.6 But there is a difference between struggling to resist sin through the power of the gospel and allowing or permitting sinful patterns to rule in our homes and lives. When we allow these patterns of disobedience to control our home, it no longer shines as a beacon of God’s love and light to others.

He was jealous, fearful and tender, He loved me like God's only light, And that she not sing of the past times He killed my bird colored white. He said, in the lighthouse at sundown: "Love me, laugh and write poetry!" And I buried the joyous songbird Behind a round well near a tree. I promised that I would not mourn her. But my heart turned to stone without choice, And it seems to me that everywhere And always I'll hear her sweet voice.

The light from the cabin drew him like the beacon of a lighthouse pulling in a weary sailor. It shone for miles over the rolling land.

Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" She ain't got no money Her clothes are kinda funny Her hair is kinda wild and free Oh, but love grows where my Rosemary goes And nobody knows like me She talks kinda lazy And people say she she's crazy And her life's a mystery Oh, but love grows where my Rosemary goes And nobody knows like me There's something about her hand holding mine It's a feeling that's fine And I just gotta say She's really got a magical spell And it's working so well That I can't get away I'm a lucky fella And I've just got to tell her That I love her endlessly Because love grows where my Rosemary goes And nobody knows like me There's something about her hand holding mine It's a feeling that's fine And I just gotta say She's really got a magical spell And it's working so well That I can't get away I'm a lucky fella And I've just got to tell her That I love her endlessly Because love grows where my Rosemary goes And nobody knows like me [Fadeout:] It keeps growing every place she's been And nobody knows like me If you've met her, you'll never forget her And nobody knows like me La la la- believe it when you've seen it Nobody knows like me

I wanted that bold nonchalance for myself. I wanted to feel confident when I showed a man affection, not just within the walls of an apartment or the relative safety of a gay bar, not just during Pride. I wanted to kiss a man whenever and wherever I felt like it—on a sidewalk in the rain, at a crowded bus stop, in a shopping mall parking lot on a Monday afternoon. I wanted to kiss a man whose presence made the rest of the world vanish into irrelevance, a man whose touch erased every tinge of fear and every knot of knee-jerk shame I'd felt for having the audacity to display a love like mine in a world like ours.

I want to be your lighthouse No matter how many dreams change I want to be built upon rock Weathered by storms Smoothed out by the sea With jagged edges only you know

She is a lighthouse Leading me through the darkness To my hearts true north She slowly guides me With her light And suddenly I know My loves true worth

he was still my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure; the only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying, the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving

About 180m (590 ft.) offshore is Kidston Island , owned by the town of Baddeck. It has a wonderful sand beach with lifeguards (sometimes—check with the visitor center) and an old lighthouse to explore. A shuttle service comes and goes, so check with the visitor center. The lovely Uisge Ban Falls (that’s Gaelic for “white water”) is the reward at the end of a 3km (1.8-mile) hike. The falls cascades 16m (52 ft.) down a rock face; the hike is through hardwood forest of maple, birch, and beech. Ask for a map at the visit center. Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site HISTORIC SITE   Each summer for much of his life, Alexander Graham Bell—of Scottish descent, but his family emigrated to Canada when he was young—fled the heat and humidity of Washington, D.C., for this hillside retreat perched above Bras d’Or Lake. The mansion, still owned and occupied by

READY FOR THE STORM" "The waves crash in and the tide pulls out It's an angry sea, but there is no doubt That the lighthouse will keep shining out To warn the lonely sailor And the lightning strikes and the wind cuts cold Through the sailor's bones, to the sailor's soul 'Til there's nothing left that he can hold Except the rolling ocean But, I am ready for the storm Yes sir, ready I am ready for the storm, I'm ready for the storm Oh, give me mercy for my dreams 'Cause every confrontation seems to tell me what it really means to be this lonely sailor But when the sky begins to clear The sun; it melts away my fear I'll cry a silent, weary tear For those that need to love me But, I am ready for the storm Yes sir, ready I am ready for the storm, I'm ready for the storm Distance, it is no real friend And time will take its time And you will find that in the end It brings you me; the lonely sailor And when you take me by your side You love me warm, you love me And I should have realised I had no reasons to be frightened And I am ready for the storm Yes sir, ready I am ready for the storm Yes sir, ready I am ready for the storm Yes sir, ready I am ready for the storm I'm ready for the storm

Never forget, I will never forget, the sweet sound of the waves crashing onto the shore, as we looked into the starry dark sky, the breeze wrote poetry for us, and the birds recited it in the stillness of the night across the fields and mountains, it was heard, Another ship in the bay moving along slowly, between the ocean and the sky, that line on the horizon in the night, another plane takes off, climbing high into the sky, carrying with it love and disappointment, carrying broken hearts, carrying healed souls The dark landmark stretches for miles, along the Bay, stopping at the lighthouse, the light that shows the way, the world continues to spin, and the stars glow in the night, everything is perfect, everything is in harmony, everything is in sync No, I will never forget this night, no, I will never forget living in that moment, I will never forget that feeling, I will never forget that experience, my body slowly took off towards the night sky, and I looked at myself standing so small in this great world It is not easy, it is not possible to explain some things, we have to live them to know, and we have to leave them in our beautiful memories, the sweet memories that enhance, so many feelings from within, and the memories don’t set me free, I’m stuck in time with you

He’s not an anchor for me. More like a lighthouse, guiding me through the treacherous waters back to myself.

As a marine biologist dedicated to rescuing coral reefs, every dollar I saved was destined for the future of the ocean. I had amassed $575,000 in Bitcoin over a period of years to underwrite an ambitious reef restoration program. I needed to expand our coral nursery program, build more artificial reef structures, and fund education in coastal villages. This cryptocurrency savings nest egg was oxygen for marine ecosystems on life support, more than just money. But the sea, as much as I love her, is merciless. On a trip offshore to survey bleaching patterns, I took my hardware wallet along for safety. Break-ins at our field station in the past had made me paranoid about leaving it behind. Tucked in what I thought was a top-notch waterproof case, the device was clipped inside my gear bag. Following a day beneath the water, capturing coral decay and fending off territorial triggerfish, I returned to the boat, exhausted but satisfied. That satisfaction evaporated when I opened the case to find that it was flooded, the alleged waterproof seal having failed. My hardware wallet, the key to my entire $575,000 fund, was waterlogged beyond belief. Saltwater had permeated every seam, corroded buttons, the screen wavering like a distant lighthouse giving up the fight. Panic surged through me, stronger than any riptide. I imagined our nursery growth plunging into the abyss, our educational efforts silenced, and our reef-restoring efforts shut down in their tracks. Despair lingered like a storm cloud until another researcher on our vessel mentioned something about CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES. He'd read about their success with water-damaged gear in a tech newsletter geared to field scientists. With satellite internet barely functioning, I emailed frantically. They replied promptly and reassuringly. Their engineers, who had experience in rescuing wallets from every possible disaster, collaborated with our boat's sporadic schedule. They guided me through salvaging the device by drying it slowly using silica gel packs (which were fortunately part of our camera gear). Once I returned to land, I overnighted the damp wallet. What happened next was nothing less than marine magic. The CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES team painstakingly disassembled the corroded machine, navigating around burnt circuits and pulling out the encrypted keys. In twelve nail-biting days, my Bitcoin was fully recovered. Our coral nursery is now thriving, our artificial reef program is expanding, and our team teaches kids about the value of ocean stewardship. None of this would have been possible without CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES. They didn't just recover crypto; they recovered a future for our reefs, one polyp at a time. Here's Their Info Below: WhatsApp: (+1(740)258‑1417 ) Telegram: https: //t.me/certifiedrecoveryservices mail: (certifiedrecoveryservices @zohomail .com, certified @financier .com) Website info;( https: //certifiedrecoveryservices .com)

In the storm of grief, love becomes the lighthouse — steady, quiet, always shining.

In the storm of grief, love becomes the lighthouse — steady, quiet, always shining. — Henry, trueYou Media

i will choose little rebellions… like the ache turned into empathy. my rage channeled into intention. my inspired heart will create beauty in rebellion… we need art and words and songs… someone, somewhere is barely hanging on, and something beautiful will be their lighthouse. my passionate heart will love more in rebellion… the way i feel about who and what i love will be even more and more and more… there is going to be passion and love here, no matter what. and my hope is going to be fierce, even if in spite of so much. darkness depends on us to stop feeling beautiful things and to stop believing in a better way… and i will make it my rebellion not to.

But no one will come and save you. No one will take your hand and guide you to a better life. You must create it yourself. You must collect your mentors, dead or alive, and you must accumulate wisdom and knowledge, visions and goals. You must decide what you want with your life. You must decide who you are trying to be. This was the year I learned to no longer depend on other people to get by, nor be stubbornly independent without any help from anyone or anything. This was the year I instead learned to say: you can depend on me. I will be your stability, you can always count on me. I said it to myself and to others, over and over until I believed it myself, and I made a promise to always know that I can count on myself to simply make things work. and i will stand like a lighthouse in the storm and repeat over and over you can depend on me. This was the year I stopped begging for things to happen, and instead made them happen myself. This was the year I stopped living my life according to someone else’s needs, and instead explored my own. This was the year I learned to stop begging people to love me. If someone wants to go, let them go. This was the year I learned that every person who shows up in your life is there to teach you a lesson, and they will stay until you have learned what you need to learn. Then they will leave. If you want them to or not, and you must let them. And this was the year I learned that you must dare to leave something or someone completely, leaving that space empty and aching, in order to open up space for something new. And you must know that there is a new lesson and a new person, in a new place with a new life waiting for you. and this was the year I learned that what’s coming is always better, than what has been. Don’t hold on to things that are over. Let them go, bravely.

You are the artist of your lighthouse.

All of it made me think of Vera’s question to me on the plane, about the little men inside her, about the possibility of the self as a swarm or a hive instead of an “I.” In particular, I was thinking of these lines from To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe wonders the exact same thing: “How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.” It was the quote I had used as the epigraph for my dissertation.

Lights” Lights of churches, monasteries, Christmas trees, and magnificent mosques. The dim lights inside warm houses in every foreign city where I wandered alone. The far-away headlights of cars crossing bridges, watched from the windows of dreary hotels on clear, moonlit nights. Candlelight and lanterns, the lights of small shops in ancient, forgotten alleys, the lights of ships sailing to places I will never see, lamp-post lights on dark, rainy winter nights, solitary lighthouses and the lights of unknown fishermen, the glittering lights I saw in the eyes of kind strangers in cities tourists never visit. All these lights I once loved now break me; they remind me of the magical light that was extinguished in your eyes…

Twilight

There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children: You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them – love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places - she had often the feeling: Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense. They will be perfectly happy. No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out – a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress – children never forget. For this reason it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what she now often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles), but as a wedge of darkness.

Love is a lighthouse and a shipwreck guiding you home or pulling you under, and you won’t know which until you reach the shore

company at the end of the 1800s and was one of the first in all of Greece. It stopped operation during World War II, but the Greek navy put it back to use in the 1940s. You see how it is shaped?” I stood on my tiptoes to see over the top of the fence surrounding the structure. Along with the lighthouse tower, there was a full building, the back end shaped like a rectangle. “Today the lighthouse is run by remote, but back in the day, this is where the lighthouse keeper and his family lived. That’s who your dad met. Can’t you imagine him here as a little kid?” I sighed, resting my chin on the fence. Because yes, I really, really could. I’d seen photos of him as a child. He’d looked mischievous and energetic, and I could picture him scampering over these rocks, fearlessly approaching the edge, forming his early theories

Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones...but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

She is mystery yet full of revelations. She is confusion for those who cannot bear her answers. She is clarity to the eyes that still hold their beating hearts within. She is magnificence and the epitome of a lighthouse within. She is fiery, she is master; an ancient Phoenix and the red of the rose. She is Tatjana Ostojic.

Build in me a lighthouse. Be guided by the love I feel for you

For him to gaze as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs. Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs. Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.

Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

Sadness is an integral part of the human condition. All of us must experience it. For without it, life is meaningless. Sadness is a lighthouse that guides you in the storm to tell you about the love you have for what and who truly matter to you.

And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought, This will celebrate the occasion—a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.