The Legend of Love I Never Knew

It was said that there was a man who was forced to the battle field. With great reluctance, the man left the wife with their lovely sons and daughters. Since then, she spent each day waiting and hoping that the day would come for her husband’s return.

More than 4600 years ago, there had been continuous violent conflicts between the agricultural Han Chinese and the non-Han Chinese herdsmen living in the north. It was said that there was a man who was forced to the battle field. With great reluctance, the man left the wife with their lovely sons and daughters. Since then, she spent each day waiting and hoping that the day would come for her husband’s return. Every dawn and dusk, she would lean against a big tree in a high mountain, only to learn that it was another day of disappointment. Her husband never returned.

Because of her continual longing, she cried under the big tree almost every waiting moment. As time went by, her tears turned blood without her realization and miracles happened. Her blood drops that fell on the ground harden and they became red beans. The red beans eventually rooted and grew into big trees that continue to produce more red beans. To commemorate the legend of this love story, people started calling the fruits of this tree – the love beans.

Red beans have a very profound cultural foundation. A red, love bean is very big, with a diameter of about 9 millimeters. This kind of bean has distinct characteristics. They are very hard and often come in heart shape. They have almost similar color to blood and can be stored for a very long time without rotting, or fading in color.

Red bean symbolizes love and faithfulness. In some part of the Asia countries such as China and Taiwan, men often present red beans to their lover to show their commitment for a relationship. Red bean also symbolizes happiness. When a bride wears jewelry made from red beans on her wrist or neck, it means that she will lead a happy life. It is also a cultural belief and practices that if married couples put six red beans underneath each of their pillows, their love would remain till eternity.

Today, fashionable women are proud of wearing red bean jewelry. Lovers exchange love beans with each other to show their love and commitment towards each other.

The article above is especially dedicated to our one-of-a-kind Love Bean Collection, created from bright red seeds of the coral bead tree. Our Love Bean Collection includes necklaces, bracelets, earrings, cell phone charms and anklets. Each of this art pieces is uniquely designed by Asian jewelry artists with simplicity and creativity to outline the message of love originated from the love bean. Love Bean Collection is unique and would never be widely distributed as it carries a message that would only be relevant to those who want to express their sincerity to their loved ones. So today, if my article reaches you, you would be the fortunate few to come to appreciate the deeper message carried by my Love Bean Collection published at my website. If you have someone that you would desperately like to show your love or appreciation to, my Love Bean Collection would be perfect for you because it is and it will always be affordable just for you and your loved ones.

How To add Romance to Your Life With Feng Shui

Though it is not commonly known, a Feng Shui life can actually help to improve your love life. Romance and love is as much a part of most peoples’ lives as food and air; so it makes sense that not having the proper flow of energy in your life may affect the romance in your life as well.

There are areas of your home that may influence your love life, such as the right rear corner of your house. This is your relationship corner. In addition to this, the bedroom is also a relationship area. If you apply some basic Feng Shui life techniques to these areas of your home, you will be more successful at attracting the right type of love energy into your life.

The very first thing you must do is cut all ties that you are keeping around to past relationships. This may include old letters, gifts or pictures. These things are nothing more than a reminder of a happy time that no longer exists. This alone, can bring sadness and bad energy into your life.

Even if you are single, set up your home as if a couple lives in it. With the Feng Shui life this is a way of attracting the energy that will bring love into your environment. Don’t overcrowd your home with your own stuff, leaving no room for another. This brings on an attitude that you have no room in your life for another person.
In addition, you should remove all things from the relationship areas of your home that may distract you from focusing on romance. This may include work related items, televisions etc. Simply move these objects to other areas of your home.

Remove some of the solitary items in these areas and replace them with matching pairs. This may include objects such as candles, pillows etc. You want to attract the energy for couples, not singles.

Add some pink to the relationship areas of your home. In the Feng Shui life, the color pink holds love energy. Pink roses or anything pink in these areas can help add some romance to your life.

These are just some very basic steps you can follow to add some romance to your life with the concept of the Feng Shui life. Try it; you just may be surprised at how much improvement you see.

A Parents Love

I gave you life,
but cannot live it for you.

I can teach you things,
but I cannot make you learn.

I can give you directions,
but I cannot be there to lead you.

I can allow you freedom,
but I cannot account for it.

I can take you to church,
but I cannot make you believe.

I can teach you right from wrong,
but I cannot always decide for you.

I can buy you beautiful clothes,
but I cannot make you beautiful inside.

I can offer you advice,
but I cannot accept it for you.

I can give you love,
but I cannot force it upon you.

I can teach you to share,
but I cannot make you unselfish.

I can teach you respect,
but I cannot force you to show honor.

I can advise you about friends,
but cannot choose them for you.

I can advise you about sex,
but I cannot keep you pure.

I can tell you the facts of life,
but I can't build your reputation.

I can tell you about drinking,
but I can't say "no" for you.

I can warn you about drugs,
but I can't prevent you from using them.

I can tell you about lofty goals,
but I can't achieve them for you.

I can teach you about kindness,
but I can't force you to be gracious.

I can warn you about sins,
but I cannot make you moral.

I can love you as a child,
but I cannot place you in God's family.

I can pray for you,
but I cannot make you walk with God.

I can teach you about Jesus,
but I cannot make Jesus your Lord.

I can tell you how to live,
but I cannot give you eternal life.

I can love you with unconditional love all of my
life . . . and I will!!!

Clear Your Mind

WISDOM: Rather than judge, try to understand. Rather than push away, try to embrace. Rather than cling, try to let go. Eventually we can stop trying and really do it.

DISCOVERY: Knowledge cannot be found under a rock. Knowledge is what we conclude about what we see under the rock.

SIMPLE: When I let myself know how to do it, I call it simple.

SHARING: Sharing is allowing you a place in my space.

LOVE: To love someone is to be happy with who and what they are, accepting them without conditions.

GUIDANCE: The only healing that ever takes place is self-healing. Medications and massages just encourage your body to do what it knows how to do.

ON BEING HUMAN: They say feeling bad is only human... but I like to celebrate my humanity, not with unhappiness, but with my loving and caring.

HAPPY PEOPLE: Happy people are loving. Fearful people are busy with other things.

THE ONLY PARADIGM: The way we choose to see the world creates the world we see.

BLINDERS: If I look only for what I expect to see, I'll miss all the other things in the garden.

TRAIL BLAZER: All dreams appear impossible until someone makes them happen.

The Science of Romance: Why We Love

The last time you had sex, there was arguably not a thought in your head. O.K., if it was very familiar sex with a very familiar partner, the kind that--truth be told--you probably have most of the time, your mind may have wandered off to such decidedly nonerotic matters as balancing your checkbook or planning your week. If it was the kind of sex you shouldn't have been having in the first place--the kind you were regretting even as it was taking place--you might have already been flashing ahead to the likely consequences. But if it was that kind of sex that's the whole reason you took up having sex in the first place--the out-of-breath, out-of-body, can-you-believe-this-is-actually-happening kind of sex--the rational you had probably taken a powder.

Losing our faculties over a matter like sex ought not to make much sense for a species like ours that relies on its wits. A savanna full of predators, after all, was not a place to get distracted. But the lure of losing our faculties is one of the things that makes sex thrilling--and one of the very things that keeps the species going. As far as your genes are concerned, your principal job while you're alive is to conceive offspring, bring them to adulthood and then obligingly die so you don't consume resources better spent on the young. Anything that encourages you to breed now and breed plenty gets that job done.

But mating and the rituals surrounding it make us come unhinged in other ways too, ones that are harder to explain by the mere babymaking imperative. There's the transcendent sense of tenderness you feel toward a person who sparks your interest. There's the sublime feeling of relief and reward when that interest is returned. There are the flowers you buy and the poetry you write and the impulsive trip you make to the other side of the world just so you can spend 48 hours in the presence of a lover who's far away. That's an awful lot of busywork just to get a sperm to meet an egg--if merely getting a sperm to meet an egg is really all that it's about.

Human beings make a terrible fuss about a lot of things but none more than romance. Eating and drinking are just as important for keeping the species going--more so actually, since a celibate person can at least continue living but a starving person can't. Yet while we may build whole institutions around the simple ritual of eating, it never turns us flat-out nuts. Romance does.

"People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms for love," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and something of the Queen Mum of romance research. "They live for love, die for love, kill for love. It can be stronger than the drive to stay alive."

On its good days (and love has a lot of them), all this seems to make perfect sense. Nearly 30 years ago, psychologist Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii and sociologist Susan Sprecher now of Illinois State University developed a 15-item questionnaire that ranks people along what the researchers call the passionate-love scale (see box, page 60). Hatfield has administered the test in places as varied as the U.S., Pacific islands, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan and, most recently, India and has found that no matter where she looks, it's impossible to squash love. "It seemed only people in the West were goofy enough to marry for passionate love," she says. "But in all of the cultures I've studied, people love wildly."

What scientists, not to mention the rest of us, want to know is, Why? What makes us go so loony over love? Why would we bother with this elaborate exercise in fan dances and flirtations, winking and signaling, joy and sorrow? "We have only a very limited understanding of what romance is in a scientific sense," admits John Bancroft, emeritus director of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Ind., a place where they know a thing or two about the way human beings pair up. But that limited understanding is expanding. The more scientists look, the more they're able to tease romance apart into its individual strands--the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, neurochemical processes that make it possible. None of those things may be necessary for simple procreation, but all of them appear essential for something larger. What that something is--and how we achieve it-- is only now coming clear.

The Love Hunt

If human reproductive behavior is a complicated thing, part of the reason is that it's designed to serve two clashing purposes. On the one hand, we're driven to mate a lot. On the other hand, we want to mate well so that our offspring survive. If you're a female, you get only a few rolls of the reproductive dice in a lifetime. If you're a male, your freedom to conceive is limited only by the availability of willing partners, but the demands of providing for too big a brood are a powerful incentive to limit your pairings to the female who will give you just a few strong young. For that reason, no sooner do we reach sexual maturity than we learn to look for signals of good genes and reproductive fitness in potential partners and, importantly, to display them ourselves.

"Every living human is a descendant of a long line of successful maters," says David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "We've adapted to pick certain types of mates and to fulfill the desires of the opposite sex."

One of the most primal of those desires is that a possible partner smells right. Good smells and bad smells are fundamentally no different from each other; both are merely volatile molecules wafting off an object and providing some clue as to the thing that emitted them. Humans, like all animals, quickly learn to assign values to those scents, recognizing that, say, putrefying flesh can carry disease and thus recoiling from its smell and that warm cookies carry the promise of vanilla, sugar and butter and thus being drawn to them. Other humans carry telltale smells of their own, and those can affect us in equally powerful ways.

The best-known illustration of the invisible influence of scent is the way the menstrual cycles of women who live communally tend to synchronize. In a state of nature, this is a very good idea. It's not in a tribe's or community's interests for one ovulating female to monopolize the reproductive attention of too many males. Better to have all the females become fertile at once and allow the fittest potential mates to compete with one another for them.

SPELL TO MAKE YOUR MARRIAGE LAST FOREVER

Materials Required:

Red rose petals
Rose water
Lavender or rosemary flowers
Jasmine scented candle or jasmine incense

Method:

Marriage spells just like love spells are really tricky and must be performed with care and tact. This spell is not intended to be performed if you are someone who wishes to get married. It is for already married couples who want to make their marriages to last forever.

First you need to separate the petals of the rose from the flower. Write the name of your spouse and yourself on the petals. For example of you have written your name on one petal you need to write your spouse’s name on the next petal. Use black ink. Do this until you have filled the names on all petals. Then dip these petals in rose water and lay them under your bed covers.

Ideally, this spell is best performed just before the both of you go to bed. Once you have arranged the rose petals under your bed covers light the jasmine candle or jasmine incense and turn out the lights. Say the following spell twice before you retire to bed for the night:

Oh Venus, the Goddess of love
It is my humble prayer to thee
That my marriage, the both of us
Forever we may be.

For a better effect place either a rosemary or lavender twig under both your pillows. This can be performed once a month or once in two months depending on the current status of the relationship that the both of you share.

Differences Between Men & Women

NICKNAMES: If Gloria, Suzanne, Debra and Michelle go out for lunch, they will call each other Gloria, Suzanne, Debra and Michelle. But if Mike, Phil, Rob and Jack go out for a brewsky, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla, Peanut-Head and Useless.

EATING OUT: And when the check comes, Mike, Phil, Rob and Jack will each throw in $20 bills, even though it's only for $22.50. None of them will have anything smaller, and none will actually admit they want change back. When the girls get their check, out come the pocket calculators.

BATHROOMS: A man has six items in his bathroom-a toothbrush, shaving cream, razor, a bar of Dial soap, and a towel from the Holiday Inn. The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 437. A man would not be able to identify most of these items.

GROCERIES: A woman makes a list of things she needs and then goes out to the store and buys these things. A man waits till the only items left in his fridge are half a lime and a soda. Then he goes grocery shopping. He buys everything that looks good. By the time a man reaches the checkout counter, his cart is packed tighter than the Clampett's car on Beverly Hillbillies. Of course, this will not stop him from going to the 10-items-or-less lane.

SHOES: When preparing for work, a woman will put on a Mondi wool suit, then slip on Reebok sneakers. She will carry her dress shoes in a plastic bag from Saks. When a woman gets to work, she will put on her dress shoes. Five minutes later, she will kick them off because her feet are under the desk. A man will wear the same pair of shoes all day.

CATS: Women love cats. Men say they love cats, but when women aren't looking, men kick cats.

DRESSING UP: A woman will dress up to: go shopping, water the plants, empty the garbage, answer the phone, read a book, get the mail. A man will dress up for: weddings, funerals.

LAUNDRY: Women do laundry every couple of days. A man will wear every article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants that were hip about eight years ago, before he will do his laundry. When he is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweatshirt inside out, rent a U-Haul and take his mountain of clothes to the Laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the Laundromat. This is a myth perpetuated by re-runs of old episodes of "Love, American Style."

OFFSPRING: Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and soccer games and romances and best friends and favorite foods and secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.