Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger’s touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-cheeked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body. But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says “I am,” and forms the core of personality.
Dragonfly In Amber, Diana Gabaldon
So begins a beautifully sweet afternoon with Noah, who turned 3 weeks old that day. It is such a wonderful experience watching newborns fall asleep, their pink little arms and toes dancing earnestly to the sun’s rays right before slumber (and how nothing in the world can wake them up once they’re there). Noah was such a good boy, crying only for his milk and a diaper change. And before we knew it, amidst all the adults fussing about him in one of the hottest days of the year, Noah sunk blissfully deep, deep, deep into dreamland.
Thank you Lynn, Jay, Yaya, Lola and Arianne for teatime and a lovely siesta hour. ♥
A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world.
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
Newborn babies can’t do much on their own -
They can’t eat or walk or talk on the phone -
But every parent is sure their creation is without a doubt a tremendous sensation.
Jennifer Davis
This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.
Rick Bragg
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
From summer she is made, my lovely summer girl,
I’d love to spend a winter with my lovely summer girl,
But I’m never warm enough for my lovely summer girl,
It’s summer when she smiles, I’m laughing like a child,
It’s the summer of our lives; we’ll contain it for a while
She holds the heat,
the breeze of summer in the circle of her hand
I’d be happy with this summer if it’s all we ever had.
Maggie Stiefvater
Because, when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world.
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.
One Day, David Nicholls
I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.
The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia
All images shot for the incredible Candy Capco Photography. To see more amazing photos from Alan and Phoebe’s beautiful Tarureka Estate summer wedding, please click here. ♥
Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.
Norman Vincent Peale
Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself.
Paramahansa Yogananda
There’s something like a line of gold thread running through a man’s words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.
John Gregory Brown
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
Million suns, and calls me on and on
Across the universe.
John Lennon
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.
e.e. cummings
All images shot for the incredible Candy Capco Photography on December 24th, 2011. To see more from Jonny and Lauren’s perfect Wellington summer wedding, please click here. Be sure to look for the candy cane! ♥
On January 9, 2002, Jami and Dielle took their first step together in a beautiful direction. Ten years later they take us back to where it all began – a little bench along a garden pathway at the Ateneo de Manila University. What a magnificent love these two souls share, their light and beauty radiating from within. Congratulations Jami and Dielle, and thank you for an entrancingly sweet and nostalgic afternoon.
Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.
Neil Gaiman
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
e.e. cummings
I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Rumi
A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything.
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
Jorge Luis Borges
No, there’s nothing half so sweet in life
As love’s young dream.
Thomas Moore
Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.
Leo Buscaglia
True love stories never have endings.
Richard Bach
In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
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