Summer Love

"All we need is the truth in our hand. Someone to call a friend. Never fear the darkness. All we need is just the sun in the sky. And the hope of a summer to come with the meaning of love. "

Henri Frederic Amiel 

Seaside Heights

Cutting Deep

" When you are in love and you get hurt, it’s like a cut... it will heal, but there will always be a scar "

unknown

Collier Mills Wildlife Refuge

New Jersey

Loving Freedom

“A loving relationship is one in which the loved one is free to be himself -- to laugh with me, but never at me; to cry with me, but never because of me; to love life, to love himself, to love being loved. Such a relationship is based upon freedom and can never grow in a jealous heart.”

Leo F. Buscaglia

Bradley Beach NJ

Taken on a beautiful December afternoon! 

Mystery

“He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Freehold Fin Fur and Feather Club grounds

 

Evolution

“Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.”

Richard Bach

Congo Gorilla experience

Bronx Zoo

Complete

Do everything with so much love in your heart that you would never want to do it any other way.”

Yogi Desai 

Ruben Museum, NYC

Love Hurts!

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love!

Neil Gaiman

Out my kitchen window. This looks like a kiss but it was actually a bite and the bully squirrel chased the other one away.

The Rose

“Love is the rose. Lust is the thorn.”

Sri Sathya Sai Baba 

Lebanon State Forest.

I was walking around a lake inside the forest and this silk rose was leaning against this tree. 

Very strange. Maybe a memorial!

Absence

“How like a winter hath my absence been. From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere!”

William Shakespeare

Leisure Village West, small pond,  Manchester, NJ 

Twisted

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Thomas Merton
Taken in Howell, NJ

Protection and Love!

“Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.”

Erich Fromm