Some slippery ideas are running through my mind.  Forgive me if they don’t make sense.  I want to try to capture them before I lose them.

According to polling, our readers’ favorite thing to give for Valentine’s Day are dinner and/or candy.  My husband falls right in there with you because he gave me a lovely box of Godiva chocolate.  My daughter sent me a little book of inspiration which I love.

This morning as my younger daughter was padding around getting ready for school her Ursula socks made me smile.  She got them from her grandmother for her birthday recently.  The cool part is that her grandmother didn’t know my daughter had spent the last several months drawing Disney villains.

For Valentine’s Day I gave my daughter a collection of romantic rock-n-roll songs performed by the Vitamin String Quartet.  “I love the Vitamin String Quartet!” she texted me when she received it.  She told me she listened to their music regularly on Pandora.  Hmm.  I didn’t know that.

One of the books I’m reading now is  Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.  My son gave it to me for Christmas.  In it, Gilbert reveals her notion that ideas move among us until they find a person or people who will work with them.  Although it sounds unlikely, I totally agree with her.  I’m perfectly content to accept it as a mystery of life.

I think love moves between us like that as well.  When we love others it allows us to learn the song in their heart.  That is how we hear, “How did you know?” when someone we love opens a gift we’ve picked out for them.  Truth is, I didn’t know for sure, but loving someone helps us make a pretty good choice.  It is a choice to love those who we share our world with isn’t it?  My notion is that love is alive and moves among us.  It is available to all of us if we want to work with it.

My question is does the magic of ideas and love simply happen to us or do we make it happen?

I’ve got to run now, but I’ll try to finish my thoughts in Part 2.