My gratitude to them [my first teachers] grows as I myself grow older.

I love whom I love

When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.

My love for those I love — not many — not very many, but don't I love them so?

I am finding out as I am aging that I am in love with the world.

As I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.

What a joy to share what I loved most with those I loved most.

Of people my own age, friends and relatives, you are my favorite.
You're all those things to me

I feel that the people who pushed me the most, including the teachers, are the ones who made the greatest impression on me and loved me the most.

They leave me and I love them more.

I love getting older. My understanding deepens. I can see what connects, I can weave stories of experience and apply them. I can integrate the lessons. Things simply become more and more fascinating. Beauty reveals itself in thousands of forms.

They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway beautiful people to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed. Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some — now carry my revelation with you — were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world — its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself — I imagine
this is how it began.

Truly, my first love.