For thought and pondering...

To love at all is to be vulnerable... If you want to make sure of keeping [your heart] intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken - it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable... The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the danger of love is Hell.

~ CS Lewis, The Four Loves

In so many ways, the more we insist on control and the more we resist the call to hold our lives lightly, the more we have to deny the reality of our losses and the more artificial our existence becomes. Our belief that we should grasp tightly what we need provides one of the great sources of our suffering. But letting go of all possessions and plans and people allows us to enter, for all its risks, a life of new, unexpected freedom.

~ Henri Nouwen, Turn my mourning into dancing