How can I grow for you something that the last thirteen plus years of marriage and more years of friendship has not brought to flower?  Yet each flower fades, dries, turns to seed and bring more the next year.  This year the garden that you have seeded is beginning to burst at the seems and I wonder if you see it.

We have made a life together – you and I – adding family and friends at varying closeness and now our little Raine.  In this last year of your life, you have spent it as a visionary spends it.  Finding inspiration and lesson in the moment, but working and building and growing for the future - the future of your own light and its expression.  The future of your precious little charge and the future of the family and community that surrounds her.

Can a life be better spent?  Can a year find something better than that?  From my angle on the universe, so often crowded by the silliness of a man’s world or a business owner’s world or the world of someone negotiating over silly things like schedules and budgets – your year seems so well spent – possibly never more so.

There is a light in you that I have seen for so many years – seen it shine forth in different intensities and illuminating different corners of the world I live in.  Sometimes, I have been blessed to have it shine directly on me and I have seen you shine it on our Raine.  I see what a transformative and awakening response that light offers.

This year I have also felt an abundance of patience from you as I struggle and am so often lost from even myself.  You are a calm or clear voice in the dark.  I know this is not easy.  I know sometimes I shout from the dark – “shut up you!” or just mumble something about how stressful my day was.  Even in these times, I feel the undercurrent of the most stable and present love that has ever been in my life.

I see you reaching out more and more to tap into the wisdom of women around you.  Finding teachers and friends, finding mentors and people to guide or counsel – this year you have taken even more meaningful steps into the circle of women, who in my mind have the answers to making life the true center of value on earth.  It is women who are most connected to it and I feel like I can see your energetic tendrils reaching out and connecting with others in the web of life and know the coming years will be rich in simply being at your side and seeing that web catch more and more goodness, truth and beauty.  I see it shaping the formation that is your growing wisdom.

I love your light.  You honor me by sharing it with my own.  I give thanks to your mother who brought you into this world and for the people who loved you into the person you are.  I feel myself a better person for having contributed some love to the mix that is you.  Happy Birthday my love – it has been a year well lived – thank you for the way you have used it! 

Peace, Love and Very Good Things,

Andrei

Christine, since you came into my life, I have felt a growing presence that is loving, stabilizing and thoughtful.  As Sherry is found of saying – you always show up.  It is rare that I encounter someone so present as you, and somehow an event without you isn’t really complete. 

Your smile! 

Your hugs! 

Did I ever tell you about Leona Wisemann – she is an old Hungarian Jewish Grandma version of you?  She went to my and Sherry’s church when we were kids and I was close friends with her son.  When you saw Leona coming at you, you saw a hug winding up and you knew you were going to have love squeezed into you with her strong arms pulling you into her soft grandmaness.  Her hugs were legendary.  Your hugs are legendary.

My father, I felt, was never more himself than after a church service when he stood in his vestments greeting people as they left the service.  Long flowing colorful robes.  Huge smile framed by a neatly trimmed beard – bright and happy eyes after having felt the Spirit moving through him as he shared his sermon, sang in his chanty sing song voice and walked us all through familiar ritual sayings and creeds.  He was filled with love and spirit, and I remember waiting in line as person after person – young and old, stoic and emotional, white, Pilipino, Chinese, everyone – were caught up in his hugs.  I waited with anticipation, knowing at an unconscious level that this was the best hug I would get all week.  The hug where he was both my father and the father of my spiritual community.  I think that this was true of everyone in that line in some shape or form – he was both spiritual leader and friend, or comrade, or counselor – some private aspect of his relationship with the person he was hugging but also his official role as a person of note in his community.  When choosing a phrase for his headstone, one that my sister and I seriously entertained was “Gave Great Hugs!” I know that people visiting his gravesite would smile and agree because his hugs were legendary.  Your hugs are legendary!

Now I feel more responsible for teaching hugs than ever.  Our little Raine is becoming a hugger of note in her own right.  She has mastered the art of the hug with patting.  She is fairly adept at the hug and squeeeeeeze technique.  She can sustain a hug for a prolonged period of time such that the hugee can truly relax and feel comfort from the hug.  What’s more is that she truly can’t get enough of hugging once she starts – at least for the people she isn’t scared of right now.  Looking at this, I know she has a bright future of hugs ahead of her.  I told Sherry the other day how much it meant to me that you had a place in your heart for her.  I am thankful that your own birth and story has made you the type of person who could teach my daughter your own hugging skills, as you love her up as only Auntie ‘Steen can.  I am thankful for you Christine because with help of a loving community that you are such a central part of, her hugs will become legendary, as your hugs are legendary.



A hug is not just a physical act.  I have come to see it as spiritual, emotional – even political act.  A hug changes the nature of people’s connections to one another.  It is a conversation between two people that transcends words.  It says that the boundaries between us all as a collection of stardust are indeed illusions.  The person who is unafraid to hug is a person who understands how closely connected we are.  Some people seem to know this at their core and you are one of them.

So on your birthday, I for one celebrate your life with an abundance of appreciation for all you have given to me, to the people we are in community with at work and to the places where our families and friends connect.  You are a wonderful big hug amidst the ups and downs of life.  We would all be the poorer without you.  Thank you so much for the evolution of your fearless and uplifting hugs and for sharing them with our little Raine-bow and the other little ones that are the future huggers our world needs.

Happy Birthday Christine – and many many more!

Peace, Love and Hugs,

Andrei