There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives - Maria Popova

Poetry opens these back doors of consciousness, giving us access to our own experience, particularly to regions we can't quite name or comprehend with the analytical mind.

"Margaret Fuller wondered whether she was "fitted to be loved" — a word choice both curious and tragic: not "worthy," bespeaking an inherent endowment, but "fitted," as if she could fit herself for love by strain and discipline. With Caroline, with Sam, and now with Waldo, she had pushed and pushed to earn the affection she longed for — a push that eventually repelled each of its objects. But she could hardly have compartmentalized her nature — the very nature by which she had reached the stratospheric heights of her achievement. Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life — the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria."

What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?