love? love! love ...

When I read I like to read about love. I am not a romance reader, I don't really l like the chaste girl and unruly, lost, angry handsome man scenario and all that swooning and descriptive language.
I don't mean the unrealistic kind of fictitious love.
I love to read books about all kinds of love. Like the love between sisters, between friends, with a person who may be dead or it's unrequited.

I enjoy books about people finding love or losing love but ultimately finding themselves.
I think love is powerful, extreme, illogical, unconditional and extremely sought after.

In The Book Thief Hans Huberman is this extremely gentle man who takes Liesel under his wing.
In Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper was a hard book to read for me because Anna is a genetic match to supply her older sister Kate with bone marrow. Their love for each other and the role that they each have to play in each other's life is debated throughout me head while I read this. It was very intense to read and hard to believe.

And in non fiction people write about their love of someone after death or after a tragedy like in Bryce Courtney's book April Fool's Day. His son Damon, a hemophiliac contracts AIDS through a blood transfusion. This book was about his love for his son, he looked at his son, it felt like I was intruding.

I read about love and think about love because it seems like such a simple confusing and natural state of being. Yet it causes so much angst and grief. But it blows me away when I see two baby siblings grinning at each other, or two old people walking hand in hand along a road, or a couple looking at each other.

And I love reading books about all kinds of love and looking at pictures like these from M.I.L.K. (Moments of Intimacy, Laughter and Kinship) Now they're trying to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the original M.I.L.K. competition, M.I.L.K. Licensing (now a subsidiary of PQ Blackwell), again in association with Elliott Erwitt, is conducting a new competition founded on the themes of friends, families, lovers and laughter to create a new collection of 150 images.
The 150 winning images will be published in a new book entitled Fresh M.I.L.K.: Friends, Families, Lovers & Laughter in Fall 2009, and on selected licensed products.

So if you have pictures and you love love as much as I do, submit them.