This is the second entry in a  section called an “Alpha-biography.”  The exercise is to work through the alphabet, commenting on a word that connects somehow to your world.  My students are doing this in English 9 this semester, and I am modelling it by creating my own alpha-biography.  For myself, I will be focusing on how I am interpreting, synthesizing and contemplating the Greek/Roman gods as I’ve been exploring them in the process of crafting the Grace Awakening series.  (I’m working backwards, so that in the blog they’ll eventually appear A-Z instead of Z-A, as they end up ordered by time).

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Young Love:

Sometimes I feel like young love coloured my entire world. I am not alone. I speak to a lot of women who are very nostalgic about the first person to whom they opened their heart. Some had negative experiences, I suppose, but I seem to meet a lot of people whose first love set them on a course of self-respect and happiness. I hope that means the negative experiences are fewer than the positive ones. Perhaps it’s just that with the span of years, one begins to find the positives, even if they hadn’t been noted previously?

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I think a good young love is one that remains a fond memory throughout your life. If you take the issues and troubles, and learn from them, future relationships can be stronger.  It can become a fuel for creative endeavours, like perhaps a novel series…

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Nostalgia can be a snare though, and if you build up a young love into impossible heights, a current love that must be worked around children, mortgage and bills, can seem as if it can’t measure up. Sometimes we idealize romance from the time when we didn’t have responsibilities, and forget that maturity requires change.

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There is nothing like the intensity of a new love, young or old. Awakening passions make everyone young when they’re first in love.  I remember giggling phone calls from a senior lady, a widow, soon after she accepted a marriage proposal.  Her giddy joy was no less than the girls in the college dorm.  Love is a happy thing, whenever it occurs, but the small space in our hearts that is occupied by that first love remains through the years, forever young and precious.