Twist on it! Stay playful

Dear The Lighthouse Readers,

This second week of February, our 24th Edition together, has been very special, with many hearts in my mind, and much music festivals to celebrate, id est The 66th Edition of the Grammy Awards, the Sanremo Italian Music Festival and the Super Bowl LVIII!

Listen, Enjoy, Share!

Big Hugs,

Your Gaia – from the Lighthouse

On the Spotlight… Music!

Watch the Super Bowl LVIII Kansas City Chiefs vs. San Francisco 49ers Half-time show performance of Usher – R&B takes the main stage

Watch all the best commercials of the Super Bowl 12 February 2024 on this link

My fav commercials

Twist on it – Oreo

Whatever you forget, Uber Eats gets anything

Rachel & Ross, 10 years later on

Change is coming, YESS!!!! Reese’s

Peanut butter & caramel !

On my mind

Throwback at my singing promising career : Claudio Baglioni – Cuore di Aliante

Question of the day: better to be rightly informed or to bask in lies? Listen

Angelina Mango- La noia, Winner of Sanremo Italian Music Festival 2024

Flowers – Myley Cyrus Record of the Year Grammy Awards 2024

Tyla – Best African Music Performance of the Year, with the record Water

Spotted! New very well-curated new songs, by Kacey Musgraves – Deeper Well & Beth Gibbons – Floating on a moment

Worth-reading:

Great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, continues to enrich, ennoble, &  empower with his teachings well into his nineties.

The articles below stem from the website Marginalian.org

1. How to transform fear into love
2. True Love and the five Rivers of Knowledge
3. Deep Listening – understanding and loving are inseparable
4. what makes a good communicator

United Nations Priorities for 2024

UN Secretary – General Remarks to the General Assembly on UN Priorities for 2024, read here Peace is our raison d’être

Special Love day

Loving each day – Ronan Keating

Tell it to your heart – Meduza

shared by a friend Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack

Pills of wisdom

• Hone/Smooth and Sharpen your Hope in language (repeat a mantra & clear your mind, to the very essence of your heart). This transforms your Hope into an actionable and practical element;
• A mantra simply clarifies, concentrates, and consecrates intent, and all meaningful transformation springs from purposeful, devoted intent.
• look inside yourself. The ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself, which in turn depends on your degree of self-understanding.

• Your wholehearted presence is a miracle
• according to Buddha, for true love there is no place for pride
• five rivers: the body (“which we do not know well enough,” he rues); sensations (“Each sensation is a drop of water in the river,” he writes, and meditation is the practice of sitting on the banks of the river, observing the passing sensations); perceptions (“You must look deeply into their nature in order to understand.”); mental formations, of which Buddhism identifies fifty-two — feeling-states and faculties like happiness, hate, worry, distraction, appreciation, and faith; and consciousness, the last and deepest of the five rivers
• The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation

May this week be filled with deep inner joy, and the willingness and the possibility to make a real transformation in your life!

always, with Hope & a Smile!

Yours,

Gaia

What is True Love?

The other day my dad suggested me the reading of Labor of Love, a book by Moira Weigel on the history of dating and the evolution of it. Interestingly enough, as the author tells in The Stranger, the term “have a date” or “make a date” comes from the practice of writing down someone’s name in your calendar or datebook.

The idea of my dad comes from a sad history of long-distance breakup and the desire to help out with tips and scientific research about it. Learning , as he always says, is the first step of improvement and development.

As explorer of the world and of human relations, I got hooked up with the topic: I think one of the deepest one in our lifetime, that drives work, relations and definitely the enabler of life happenings.

First of all, I got so impressed by the amount of songs that speak about love. Think about Whitney Houston, Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion, the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Nat King Cole, Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder and many others singers and music composers in the history of all genres of music ( even hard rock, singing as a reaction of anger from a lost love); Movies: how many of you have cried by watching Titanic? Or have identified in the characters of When Harry met Sally? or have watched at least a couple of times Gone with the Wind with your mothers? Not talking about the several romantic movie scenes of Love Actually…or ever felt the possibility to blank the mind and start from zero in love as the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? or ever taken off with a plane to go somewhere and find yourself again after a broken heart, like in Eat Pray Love? How many of men have ever thought of taking the role of the character in What Women want or ever wanted to be the classy and gentleman man of Pretty Woman? How many women have ever wanted to dance like the characters in Grease and listen to the music in the headphones in La Boum and magically fall in love….. or dream of a perfect dreaming love as in the Notebook?

Some examples are these and many more. Everything in this universe speaks about love, from songs and movies, from books to human stories, until the very words of people while interacting with one another. Many human and violent tragedies are happening in the world as well, spurred by hatred on the other hand, negative feelings of non-acceptance, not-belonging to a community and rejection of oneself and non-acceptance of “the other”, the newcomer, rejection of news, unwillingness to put yourself in the shoes of others, of learning about other cultures, other ways of thinking, other behaviors and other traditions & customs, other religions and other languages- which tell a lot about people and the way they act. Physical and verbal violence is often the reflection of the friction and the block to opening up to the world’s constant changes. Rigidity kills; being dynamic and flexible on the other way always pays back.

Yesterday a friend of mine and I were discussing about the meaning of true love and the passing of time. He was (wisely) telling me that Love with capital L, the one we hear on the radio through the voices and the lyrics of songs, is just the beginning of a long journey: It can (and hopefully) start with a big bang in the heart, an explosion of sparks and infatuation. However, the true barometer to understand if it is really and profoundly true is the holding on to it, through the passing of time, and the nurturing of it, through all the years, like flowers that regularly need water to grow and blossom. It is a shared path, where persistence, determination and time play a major role. It is not a matter of an instahappiness or instaphotograph, or a constant messaging on whatsapp. It is a living story where two people are involved. A story where the two need mutual support and encouragement to keep their passions, share them with the loved one and then, create another story, a shared-one, together. A story able to elevate both to be, as he said, “the best part of themselves”.

On these first thoughts and to kick-off of the conversation, I leave you with a great jamming by Dave Matthews Band, including beautiful “The Space between us” and “Two Step”, here the Youtube Mix while writing this blog post, and stunning pictures that show, to me ( and I hope they speak to you too) the meaning of “watering and nurturing love like flowers”, the ups and downs of love, like the waves of the ocean, and the passing of time and the patience to wait like when you go sit on a bench and wait for the right moment to stand up and go, or, you patiently wait for your love to come sit next to you, with a peaceful and calm heart.

Lots of Love and enjoy the start of a sunny summery new June week! 🙂

Gaia