When Time who steals our years away Shall steal our pleasures too, The mem'ry of the past will stay, And half our joys renew.

Some early writing say that when people kiss, they exchange the soul, that it's between their mouths and tongues that the soul is exchanged. And so the kiss is more of a soulful connection maybe than intercourse and other ways of being together. A kiss asks a lot from you. I think it asks a lot from a person to really kiss.

Sweet flowers alone can say what passion fears revealing.

We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul.

With what a deep devotedness of woe I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain, And memory, like a drop that, night and day, Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!

An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find value, love, and union with the world around us. As mystics of many religions have taught, that sense of rapturous union can give a sensation of fulfillment that makes life purposeful and vibrant.

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes.