the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain.

We are touched by what Virgil, in The Aeneid, called “the tears in things.” We appreciate that built into all existence is a grief about impermanence; a vulnerability to disappointment, hurt, and loss; a resignation to suffering. That touches us both as participants in the givens of the human story and as loving witnesses to it.

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.

But, one could ask, what about sorrow? We all know that there is sorrow in life. It comes to each of us in the loss of someone we love, in the loss of our power