I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be.

It turns out, after a lot of exploration, that I'm not really a princess. A swell gal, sure, but not a princess.

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.

All good things spring from Self-Love.

When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... My pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.

Oh I'm sure you're right,' Auntie said. 'Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live.

I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

Sister, why do you do that?'Do what?'Cage the animals at night?'Well...' She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me.'We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them.'But if somebody loved one them,' I asked, 'wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?'Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow.' She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. 'But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together.