Tag: Quote

Your Name is Love

Your Name is Love

by TheSecretLifeOfPandas ♥ 2 Comments

“Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.”  – Martin Luther King Jr.

Every weekend, Friday night and Sunday morning, I sing in the choir at my church.

There is a song by Christian artists, Evan Craft and Banda Horizonte, called Su Nombre es Amor, and I love when it comes up on our song list. My favorite part being the pre-chourus and chorus:

“Mis ojos fijaré en aquel que ya venció 
Me asombraré, mis cadenas Él rompió 

Su nombre es amor, 
Su nombre es amor, 
Jesús 
Su nombre es amor, 
Su nombre es amor, 
Jesús”

“I will fix my eyes on He who already triumphed.  I am in awe, He has broken my chains.

His name is love, His name is love,  Jesus. His name is love, His name is love, Jesus.”

We are proclaiming He is love. Because this is what we believe and this is what we know.

I’ve had love on my mind a lot lately. All kinds of love. The divine love I sing about, the familial love I feel for my family and friends, the romantic love I feel towards my boyfriend, the fraternal love for my fellow man– my neighbor.

Because I spend so much time reading about the pain and suffering my neighbors are going through, hunger, poverty, violence, homelessness, murder, depression, suicide– a laundry list of heart-wrenching pain. And I feel hopeless in my inability to help these strangers who are so far from me.

These people are in dire need of a demonstration of love. And I’m not trying to be cheesy or cliched. I’m not talking about sitting in a circle, holding hands, singing all you need is love with our eyes closed, and an acoustic guitar. I don’t mean going around saying “I love you” to everyone you see. You see words mean nothing if there isn’t any action to back it up.

Love isn’t just an abstract noun, an idea we spend a lifetime searching for. It is concrete, an action verb. We need to love. It is something we do. Love is a weapon we can bear to combat the hopelessness we feel in the world around us.

Instead of doing nothing but scrolling through headlines and feeling sad I can take a look around at the people that are within the reach of my love. Being love for them with a kind word, with an open ear, with my money, with food, with supplying a need that needs to be met. I want to be love for the people around me.

Because when everything feels like chaos, there is always one thing you can control, the way you react and the action that you take.

So choose to love.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”- Martin Luther King Jr.

100 Happy Days

100 Happy Days

by TheSecretLifeOfPandas ♥ 5 Comments

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” — Anne Frank

I feel like it shouldn’t be so hard to be happy.

Happiness should be one of those things granted to you by life– Like the ability to breathe.

However sometimes I feel like I get so caught up in looking for grandiose happy moments that it keeps me from appreciating the small simple moments that happen daily.

Things like the the train running express directly to my stop in the suburbs, sitting in the sun room with my roommates laughing about silly things or waking up to the sounds of a snoring dog.

Lately I’ve seen the hashtag “100HappyDays” floating around the vastness of the interwebz on simple picture posts about pies, flea markets and unpacking moving boxes and I was intrigued by the idea of these small tokens of happiness.

My intrigue led me to Google the hashtag and I found a website by the same name.

The concept is simple; be happy.

Find the happy in 100 consecutive days without giving up.

One of the main excuses for people not completing the task was a lack of time.

The hecticness and stress of a busy schedule cause most people to miss the things keeping their lives from being a complete mess.

Or maybe I’m projecting?

Regardless I liked the idea of finding the small and the less obvious and signed up for the challenge.

However because I’m a writer and I’ve been going through a small bout of writer’s block I’ve decided not to only photograph my happy, but to also take those moments and write about it.

So consider this a precursor to my hundred happy days and I encourage you, my dear friends, to take the challenge. Even if it’s not in taking a bunch of pictures and hashtagging the crap out of them, like many of us like to do, but just taking a moment every day to recognize the small, the insignificant, overlooked parts of our lives that make us smile every day.

Because those are the things that will shine in the moments when everything seems so dark.

So here’s to 100 happy days.

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Happy Birthday, Frida

by TheSecretLifeOfPandas ♥ 5 Comments

Happy Birthday, Frida

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”

–Frida Kahlo