May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans.

Love enmeshes you in your partner's unique set of karmic complications, so make sure you're very interested in his or her problems. Love is a laboratory where you can uncover secrets about yourself that have previously been hidden, so be ravenously curious.

In the future, judges will send criminals to holy spots where reverence-provoking beauty will overwhelm their addiction to hatred.

To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you're smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness.

The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil. Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination.

If you bury your face in your tear-stained pillow and beg God to please send you your soul mate, may you not slur your words in such a way that they sound like "cell mate."

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.