From the Book of 'We': 2004-2009 (Decker and Kendra)

I came across this book at the Beloit house and was instantly inspired by the quotes. It's essentially a memory book with experiences shared between Kendra and Decker - with amazing quotes. I feel so much around them - resonating... Here are my favorites:

The flap of the book read:

Warning!
So much as a glance at this book will either...
#1 Make you fall in love
#2 Make you join a convent
#3 Make you jealous (of us!)

Intro:

When love beckons you
Follow her
Though her ways are hard & steep...

For even as love crowns you
so does she crucify you
Even as she is for your growth
so is she for your pruning
Even as she ascends to your heights
and caresses your most tender branches that quiver in the sun
So shall she descend to your roots
and shake them in their clinging to the earth...

All of these things shall love do unto you
That you may know the secrets of your heart
and in that knowledge become a fragment of life's heart

- Kahlil Gibran

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along

- Rumi

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
...if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver (extended part of the quote was taken from Kendra's FB profile)
This one makes my heart ache and an excitement knowing that it's all here.

If you are waiting for anything to live and love without holding back, then you suffer
Every moment is the most important of your life
No future time is better than now to let your guard down and love

- David Deida

For this is wrong, if anything is wrong:
Not to enlarge the freedom of a love with all the inner freedom one can summon
We need, in love, to practice only this: Letting Each Other Go
For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it

- Rilke (one of my favorite writers ever)

The last quote (coupled with their wedding pictures):

You must give yourself to love, if love is what you're after
Open up your hearts to the tears and laughter
And give yourself to love
Give yourself to love

- Kate Wolf

Also, another one I took from Kendra's FB. (I imagine that she handpicked all of these quotes herself.)

When you consider the inevitability of death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we are awkward sometimes, care for another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, or enjoy a non-stop expanse of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children that we all are.

- Diane Ackerman