Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

- Czeslaw Milosz, 1911 - 2004
("Love," The Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz, translated from the Polish by Robert Haas)

A certain day became a presence to me;
and there it was, confronting me - a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic -- or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what I knew: I can.

- Denise Levertov, 1923 - 1997
(''Variations on a Theme by Rilke," Breathing the Water)

The illustrations above are by Honore Appleton (1879-1951), Richard Doyle (1824-1883), and Walter Crane (1845-1915). This one's for Howard, with love.