What Have You Been Learning Lately?

With a love that's raw She will say, "Sabrina, your love must not depend on sad-eyed boys. You can be in love with sunflower dresses and vegan lasagna and Rice Krispie Treats and rain and skateboarding and Martha Graham and angel fountains. Then the sad-eyed boys will come. Eventually their fear will fade and they will come." -Francesca Lia Block in "Safe Love" In October 1999, I was 15 years old and a devout reader of Seventeen magazine. Most months delivered content that wasn't particularly enlightening for a young woman (HOT nail polish colors for summer!! Does he like you? How to get him to like you!!). However, in October 1999 Seventeen published a short story by Francesca Lia Block, lines of which are quoted above and still resonate with me. Every time I would get my feelings crushed, I would return to that quote like a salve for the wound, reminding myself of the importance of continuing to love even in the midst of the experience of great

He lifted the tome out of my bag and asked what he was holding. I explained that it was my notebook, but that over the years it became a catchall for anything precious I wanted to keep- recipes, photographs, journal entries, lists of pros and cons, boarding passes and train tickets, poetry, letters I never sent and some I did. It was a beautiful handmade Christmas gift from a dear former love and has been a silent witness to the steady cycle of  destruction and recreation in my life over the last five years. Only five years? Is that really possible? Can it really only have been five years when so much has happened since? This time five years ago I was in love, living in San Francisco in the Tenderloin, working for the culinary school and attending my first Kundalini yoga classes. I had had my first Reiki atunement the previous fall and this introduction to alternative healing, plus taking sliding scale classes at Yoga to the People in Berkeley, planted the seed in my mind for a comm