Find Comfort and Inspiration 
Your task is not to seek love, but to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it – Rumi When love disappears the pain feels like a terminal illness. The profound ache might entomb your heart, turning you into a person estranged from feeling. You may flap your butterfly
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There’s an example of all that is good buzzing at the end of our block. It’s a home being re-built. My friend Judith lost half her house from the wind. It was the only victim of Hurricane Irma in our neighborhood. Her oak tree, with hundreds of rings, gave in to one of the last
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Love looks like so many things. The little symbols of love are the most endearing, like the weedy bloom my son Matt picked from a neighbor’s lawn and brought to her door when he was four. It also looks like the long floral dress Matt bought me at a neighborhood yard sale when he was
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E. E. Cummings wrote the perfect poem of love. It reaches right into your soul. My favorite line is, “I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)” A heart within a heart is such a tender image. And then you consider the weight of the promise. To carry a heart inside
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Forgiveness was never top-of-mind when I thought about my mom. A list of childhood grievances sat on my heart for decades. Now I think about how hard it was to be a young, single mother with a mental illness. Rita did some extraordinary, hair-raising things when I was growing up, like throwing her boyfriend’s computer
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I’m in love with our foster puppy Maggie. This morning she was a toasty little bean bag in my lap. We sat in an upholstered rocker by a window, rocking and looking out at a tall magnolia and the milky sky. When she started to drift into sleep she tucked her head in the crook
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I’ve been fostering puppies for years, but I never had one like Maggie. I met her when she was nearly lifeless. In the lobby of the Atlanta Humane Society, I saw a vet tech turn the corner with a bag of bones dangling from her arms. It looked like a burn victim, red and blistered.
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My mother’s love was big. Rita was the parent waving wildly from the audience with a big, toothy smile during school plays. In high school I messed up my solo in Oklahoma when I saw her waving like a lunatic from the middle of the audience. Other parents sat patiently, hands in their laps, and
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Saye and Moira are best friends. Moira was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer recently. And what did Saye do? She turned up the love. She even threw a surprise party for Moira the night before her chemotherapy began. She wanted to shower Moira with love before her heartless journey. The night of the party,
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