You’re the golden door to mystical chambers inside of me. Around me. Beating my heart. You close wounds. You open awareness. To things that are so removed from this world it’s a place of safety. Retreat. And dashing forward. To angels that whisper so softly, but I’m in a softer place where I can hear. There can’t be such beauty! Yet how could there not be? It’s all there in your face. Your expressions. Countless ones. It’s like some sort of grand symphony with so many sections playing at once, and I’m trying to absorb – hear – them separately to appreciate them all. All while inside the gestalt of it. It plays from all sides. It plays in a circle around me. Melodies of God. It’s all there in you. And, like the greatest symphonies, they are timeless. They are still played today, centuries later. And will be played long after I’m gone. You’re the symphony. Music I never dreamed I would ever hear. Timeless. There is something so unmistakably eternal about you. It dances about me like fugues when in that softer place removed from the day. I know it must be everywhere, in everything, but I see it in you. And through you, I see it through the world. It’s quiet. It’s powerful. And when you catch the moment in time just right, it opens up to you, delicate strings that engage you, they pull you in. Into a heart that beats deeper than my own. That eternal heart that provides. For everything. For everyone. Some just don’t seem to hear it. Maybe a few hear it through another if they’ve been so wonderfully blessed. But, it’s there. I feel it. In the darkest part of the night when sleep won’t come, in a house where the only sound is an old hound sleeping sound. And of those middle of the night sounds of creaking pipes and floorboards. That’s when the comfort comes. The sound-ness. That quietest time. There is a gentleness. A feeling. A knowing. Of being carried. Of being held. In the palm of a great hand, strong, but gentle. Powerful-gentle. And hearing the tick of a golden watch on that Great Hand, just above, and feeling comforted by it in the way a puppy taken from his mother too young would be given a ticking wristwatch in the old days. All with the thought the tick of the watch would mimic the heart of his mother. And she would be comforted. People are funny that way. The thought that says the mechanical cold watch will comfort the being who is aching for the warm fleshy beat of his mother’s chest. To a logic alone that might make sense. Logically. But, perhaps, that is exactly where logic alone will go. Logic looks at stat sheets, and when the stat sheets don’t convey the true enormity of what can’t fit in the mind, they call those *intangibles.* You are everything intangible! That’s when the logic hands over the job to the heart, shaking its confused head, defeatedly saying, “Well, *you* make sense of this, will you?” And, the heart does. It takes over the job. Such an imperfect man. But, even I marvel over myself in moments. Because it’s all too perfect. The heart understands the fearless dive to the floor to save a ball from going out of bounds. The heart understands the selfless moment of giving for another’s glory that won’t be typed into a stat sheet for endless statistical analysis. It often results in those moments we live for when the stats prove – conclusively! – that this team can’t win. And then it does! But, that’s a different kind of winning. A different showing of the heart. That Kevin Garnett moment of tears streaming down his face, when all he can utter joyously through the tears is, “Anything is possible! Anything is possible!” From his heart. … But, there are other showings of the heart. Away from the things of games and grandeur. A quiet moment in the middle of the night next to a sleeping dog, when the world is asleep except for a curious mouse, where a person sits in a rocking chair with nothing but the feeling of being in that great hand. In the palm of it. And feeling the beating of that heart that beats bigger and grander beneath his own. Supporting the whole thing. When that Great Gentleness comes and wraps you up. You’re living in a different place these days. Your whole consciousness feels different. Bigger, grander, and yet gentler. The fear is taken away, and not through any great bravery. But through grace of that something holding you, guiding you. You feel it as real as your non-typing hand feels the pup by your side. There is no goal to win a game. … *“So, what is your goal?” “This,” you answer. And, she smiles.* … It’s really just *this*. … You’re the most beautiful woman. The most beautiful person. In all the definitions of beautiful that are as countless as the shades of your smiles, your expressiveness, your wonder. Gatsby’s undoing wasn’t his undying love for Daisy. It was that he let something impure come into it. His own insecurities of his poor childhood from which was borne an insatiable need to craft a vision of his life that included her, but also things that glorified himself. His ego. His need to succeed. If that had not been, he would have latched onto that moment when Daisy said, “If only we could run away.” But, he had something to prove. That was a fork in the road, and he took the wrong path, figuratively and literally as it turned out. Here, it’s different. Here, upon deeper thought just north of the heart but closer to it, the thought comes that I’m living the goal. Right now. This is it! A goal set somewhere in me – long before – that never consciously came to mind. To fall in love. With no goal. No “If only we could run away.” But, knowing I’m a tough customer, she would have to be the most spectacular woman I had ever envisioned. So, the Divine heard, and did me one better. It said, “I’ll take everything you think is the most beautiful, and we’ll put that aside for the moment, and present something that knocks you so far into eternity you’ll come out the other side!” Something that rocks the very foundation of you. So much so your memories and beliefs and yearnings, and your very identity itself, are all shattered in glassy pieces on the floor. Along with the glasses that have slipped off your nose and become a part of the mess. And, as much as they try, they ain’t gonna put Humpty back together again. “Good luck, boy.” And, the funny thing … that’s the gift! Because you are so beyond the scope of my ability to even take you all in. Because you are that someone who illuminates parts of me it’s like living in an old house for years – and suddenly discovering there are secret doors!! You’re the most beautiful person I have ever seen. And you will still be that most beautiful one at any age and in any shape. Because it’s so far beyond anything even based in the shallow. You’re life. You’re magic. Someone would yearn to be with you, yes, because that’s the closest point to the Sun. But you’re shooting your rays off everywhere. It’s in the rays for me. It’s all I’ve got, but they warm me wherever I am and wherever I go. All these secret doors are open and the house feels so much larger. There’s more room to move. And to dance. And to explore. You’re the master architect. The handy person with keys hanging from her belt, knocking on walls, saying, “You know, it’s not the mouse you’re seeing. It’s the ones you’re *not* seeing!” And, I never say to the handy person, “So, how much is this gonna cost me?” (Or say, “That *mouse* you’re referring to has a name. It’s Marvin!”) No. Cost seems like some foreign word from some other language left behind. Maybe the language of logic. The heart simply asks, “What can I give?” Because you’ve given me so much. It sounds odd in a world of logic. But it’s just how it is in this other place. All this carving out inside. The job might have been started before you, but you sure finished the job! All the cringe-worthy moments for me made along the way weren’t always the ones you might expect. (Others would say the whole thing, of course!) They were the stupid missteps when I let my ego take over. “Oh, won’t this be cute!” Oops. Cringe! Nope! All that dumb ego stuff. The ones that always seem a brilliant idea at the time. But, the ones that came from the heart, as over-the-top as they were, as “wanted in twelve states! dead or alive!” as they may have gotten me, those I don’t lose sleep over. Who *wouldn’t* want to celebrate you? And though I’m shooting rubber darts into pitch blackness, I feel like, if *any* of them landed, it would have been those over-the-top, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart ones. … The heart. Those chakras they talk about. The bottom three chakras beneath the chest, they’re varyingly about power and ego and lust and greed. But, we dress them up to look like they’re coming from somewhere else most of the time. But, when you reach that fourth one up, there’s the heart chakra. As silly as it sounds, witnessing you was the most profound thing ever for me. It opened up that fourth-one-up in me so much that those that come from the bottom three hold so very little interest for me now. They still rumble around those stomach areas to be heard, but whatever the “I” is in my “I” … it doesn’t want to listen to them anymore. You’ve changed my “I.” However it is I experience myself. I’m still so very flawed, but it’s not a stretch to say your grace lifted so many of those lesser qualities away. I marvel at you because … oh, I wish I had the words. It’s beyond words. Except to say you’re an angel. A treasure. Someone to be treasured. Adored. To be always surrounded not by, “What will this cost me?” but by “What can I give?” Giving without a goal. Because when someone loves you in the deepest way, it’s the only response that could come to mind. Even if it’s something so silly as someone who fell for you over the air, beyond the seas, and through the wires. The world can say what it wants, but I know the world that has been changed in me. I wish everyone could experience the wonder that is so big only a fraction of it can come through the words, these wires. I feel like I was whittled down enough before seeing you that something bigger said I was ready for you to finish the job. In me. And, oh boy, did you ever! And you’ll know if someone isn’t being honest about experiencing it if they ever ask you what it will cost them. Or, then again, maybe it’s like not-knowing-what-you-don’t-know. Maybe they just don’t know their house has secret doors. But, when you do feel it, you’ll know because you’ve never felt anything like it before. You don’t try to pick up the pieces of your glasses on the floor along with your shattered ego and ideals and falsehoods and beliefs. It would be like trying to recover pieces of the egg shell when a beautiful baby bird now rests with you. That’s the gift. That’s the goal. The hatching. Inside. I feel so absurdly blessed that I was allowed to see and feel it all in someone as marvelous as *you!* When God said, “Okay, we’ll put your little ideals to the side for a moment,” and with a Divine wink, added, “We think you’re going to like this picture!” I never in a million years could have expected that beauty of yours. It blows the lids off stoves. Houses off the ground! And all the useless, clinging parts of my old self died a needed death. Death in the best sense. As it says, “When the angel of death comes to you, it is terror. But, when it reaches you, it is bliss.” Well, I hope in that final sense, it’s a long ways off! But, in terms of metaphor, it’s real. It had to be the most beautiful being of all. And, with the most powerful eyes of all. That only one who could tear apart places in you, before you could find yourself resting gently in a state of a new and deeper kind of bliss. Even when written on a night when sleep just wouldn’t come no matter what, and a formerly sleeping hound is now in my lap due to an unexpected thunder storm! Now the rains pour down hard, the thunder is slamming down – *boom! clap!* – but I can give comfort to another scared little being in the way I feel comfort that came about through you. And it’s all being held by something greater, in a bigger palm, and I’m feeling the eternal beat of its heart all about me while I write these words. I knew there had to be a reason I couldn’t sleep tonight. And that’s the gift of it all. *This.* A gift that keeps getting opened and yet it is never fully unwrapped. Because there’s always something more. Even if it’s the rare sleepless night slam-packed with thunder, lightning and rain. And finding the beauty to behold. The gentleness underlying. Holding you. Carrying you along. Your beauty astounds. It mesmerizes. It enraptures. It blesses. It absolves. All with the knowledge there are even more secret doors. But I would dissolve if I were to discover more perhaps! As the handywoman might say, “It’s not the secret door you’re seeing. It’s the ones you’re *not* seeing!” Who could handle any more?! And, yet, with you, you know they’re there! Yes, even more! The knowledge that as life altering as your magic is – and it is magic, it’s only the *start* of you! That’s enough to finish anybody! But, oh, what a finish that would be! You’re the most sensational woman in the world. Now there’s a statistic that belongs on every stat sheet! … And, you most certainly have all the intangibles covered. ❤️