Sometimes, when the heart is heavy,
the world of wonder and beauty can seem
little more than a vast, pitiless sea
with dark waves rolling relentlessly on,
great, towering crests and troughs
carrying only strife, struggle, injustice
and a squalid, petty, deceiving tide
of narrow self-interest. Then
I reach for your hand, feel its warmth,
sense a strange, mysterious connection,
the greater sea of lives intimately shared,
and buoyed by a wave of love, hope and joy,
surrender to its transcendent surge,
letting it take me wherever it will.