"I carry your heart"

It's my birthday today.

I'm 23.

Eight hours and twenty one minutes into it and already have felt many outpourings of love from the people in my life who have claimed a piece of my heart these years past.


Birthdays, for me, are an awesome reminder to pause and take stock of another year that has passed. So much has changed this past year -- so much growth -- but the greatest lesson I have learnt, I think, or at least the most valuable, has been the maturing of my knowledge and experience of Love.

We live in a society that holds such a rigid, limited, 2-dimensional definition of Love -- when lust, infatuation, friendship, companionship remain within their boundaries, and there is no scope for creativity, fluidity.

But if I had to sum up my growth in my relationship with God -- and with that, growth in and of myself -- it would be this renewing of my definition and fourth-dimensional experience of Love. His Love for me. My Love for Him. My Love for those around me. A Love that is quiet, but immutable; a Love that is humble, but revolutionary; a Love that is fluid, but strength -- each thought, each word, each interaction, each moment, each day, each year that passes by.

I have made peace with my limitations in being able to Love on my own strength and, ironically enough, through that, have been able to REVEL in Love. In God. And God is Love.


As I sit here in bed, typing away, in an apartment that used to be a halfway house for the crazy; as I sit here in bed, typing away, with my earthly family at the other end of my country; as I sit here in bed, soaking in the glorious orange hue of the early morning sunrise pouring in through the window on another clear, crisp, perfectly still Dunedin morning... as I sit here, one year older, I am, content. I am, at peace. And I remember, that I am loved. And what is life... without love.

Happy birthday 23 year old Anna. From, 22 year old Anna.


"I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)
I am never without it (anywhere I go, you go my dear;
and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
I fear
No fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)
I want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
And it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
And whatever a sun will always sing is you

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
And the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
And this is the wonder that's keeping the starts apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)"

-E.E. Cummings