The Little Flowers of St. Francis

A new clarity dawned. My heart is a garden of love and your image is the spring from which all the water flows giving birth and growth to ten thousand flowers. What a beautiful creature you are. You opened up my heart. I call it love now. But it was something different from all of the love I had known before. I saw you in that sun light and you became the radiance love, of my own being, of God. It made all the difference for me. It awakened and transformed me and introduced me to the transcendental force of love.

Love is the power that transforms. And it comes from within. It is the power of God within you. We get it by hints and by dispensations. We get it in fits and starts. But sooner or later we do get it.

It's what makes the flowers grow.

Dreams of Blue Topaz

You filled my mind with your beauty. Dreaming of you has become a nightly event. The dreams are heavenly scenes. The dreams of you have been the greatest of gifts. The closest I've ever come to heaven has been with you in my dreams. My favorite, the all time favorite dream of my life, was the one when you were an angel, completely decked out in angel garb: the wings, the glow around the head, the incredible white dress… the works. You came to me and held me. And you loved me. That feeling of being loved was the most intense feeling of being loved I’ve ever had, awake or asleep. I have never in all of my life felt so loved. To say it was ecstasy is to understate it.

I want to thank you for that dream. I'll thank you for that first. Feeling that kind of love changed everything for me. It was that gift that has been the source of all this inspiration. It was that gift that made me realize that loving you, is, in fact, the purpose and meaning of my life.

The Sun Lit Hallway

It was a beautiful day. The summer sun poured in through the long row of windows heating up that hallway like a greenhouse. I walked through the sun-lit hallway toward the cafeteria. That's when I saw you. You were walking toward me. It wasn't the first time I'd seen you. But it was the first time I looked into your eyes. You walked toward me and as we got close my eyes fixed on you. I looked into your eyes and I felt something explode inside me. My heart caught on fire.

Was that really the beginning? Is that what started this journey? Was that the ur-datum of my love. It has been said that what has a beginning must have an end. And so no, this was not the beginning; this love had no beginning, but for the sake of our story we must pick a spot, a provisional beginning.

I know that my love for you has always been there. Sometimes in the foreground and sometimes in the background. In fact, to search for the absolute beginning would take us down a bottomless rabbit hole.

"Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?"

Love happened that day. So I take that day as the beginning of this story... the story of my love for you.