What do you do when you want to love, when you feel duty-bound to continue what once seemed love, and yet the love in your heart has fled? At that time, you go through motions. You try to hide your lack of love from yourself and others. And your heart is heavy. You do not want involvement at this moment. It has become painful. You want peace.

Let it be all right to be on vacation from that particular love for a while. Do not demand it of yourself. Let it rest. And when your once-loved is in your presence or out of your presence, bring them to My light. Bring them close to it. Bring them right up to it. In other words, deliver them to Me. I will renew them. And as you bring them to Me, you are also exposed to My light, and you will be renewed.

Love does not come nor stay on command. The lack of love does not either.

Many things are included in your definition of love. Let your definition of love then include the remains of love and the consideration and courtesy that you then engender.

It is hard to feel love when you are not happy with yourself. If only the only person could be more loving, you are sure you would feel happier with yourself. And they are perturbed the same as you.

Yet all the time I tell you that love alone is. Of course, it is not the fervor you often associate with love. What then can it be that covers up this underlying quietness of love? What crowds it out? Why does attention so swiftly go to that which injures your heart and makes you want to flee?

When there is only love in the whole wide world, why is there strife? How is strife manufactured? Why is strife so clear to you and love often not?

It is necessary to delve beneath the surface of life. It is necessary for your well-being. It is necessary for the love in your Human heart.

You paint a picture on a canvas. Or you buy one. You love it. Later in the day you may not love it any more, but you cannot say that there is no canvas. Obviously there is a canvas. But you get swept up in the picture that no longer seems to suit you and forget about the canvas upon which the picture is painted.

There is a common ground in life, and you and everyone stand there.

What surface infraction has dismayed you?

Without ego, you are not so dismayed by another's mood or discontent. Nor are you so dismayed with your own. When you are out of ego, you do not feel owed, and therefore you do not feel discounted. You consider moods, yours and others, as changes in the weather, none of which are permanent. Changes are not permanent. But you and love and I are eternal.

In the world, there is always weather of one kind or another, and there is something behind the weather and beyond it. The weather is a representation of something greater than itself. Weather does not exist by itself. It is a playing out of something. It is the removal of one temperature for another, again and again.

Love when affected by a particular this or that, love when directed to or from a particular person or object in mind, has its own weather and its own seasons. You don't have to make much of them. Love goes on just the same. Don't mind so much the passing frailties of love as it is known in the world. There is love greater than this.