They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.

I would have spoken, had my heart not been in my throat

The six rules of maybe 1. respect the power of hope and possibilites. Begin with beleif. Hold onto it. 2. If you known where you want to go, you're already half way there. Know what you desire but, more imporantly, why you desire it. Then go. 3. hopes and dreams and heart's desires require a clear path-get out of your own way 4. Place hope carefully in your own hands and in the hands of others 5. Persist, if necessary 6. That said, most importantly-know when you've reached an end, Quit, give up, do it with courage. Giving up is not failing-it's the chance to begin again.

But an apology too — you think you’re giving something, but you’re not. You’re really asking for something. You’re asking for forgiveness, you’re asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.

I didn't know what I wanted to Be...A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards...I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win...What is fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to "succeed" at your chosen "direction" was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too.

Sometimes love is a surprise, an instant of recognition, a sudden gift at a sudden moment that makes everything different from then on. Some people will say that's not love, that you can't really love someone you don't know. But, I'm not so sure. Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature--an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.

Sometimes maybe you should let someone you love travel great distances away from you. You shouldn’t think you needed to set out to retrieve them and put them back where they belonged. Sometimes they were only safe and happy, like Annabelle Aurora. And then other times, it was just possible they were lost at sea. It would be your duty, then, to get out into the boat and search, even if the waves were choppy and the wind was howling the protests of the dead.