Falling In Love

I read, a lot.  It seems to be the best way for me to truly relax.  Which means I mostly read books for entertainment and hardly for educational purposes.  But that's beside the point.  I came across something yesterday that I thought was beautiful and I wanted to share.  I found it in the book "Sunlight and Shadow" by Cameron Dokey.  It's a cute story that is a retelling of the opera "The Magic Flute" by Mozart.  The author took some liberties with modernizing the story and gave the characters a unique voice that was fun to read.

What I enjoyed was the main character's description of falling in love.  Her name is Mina and this is how she describes meeting and falling in love with Tern as he plays his flute...

"I was the one who did the changing.  For, as the song of the flute wove through me, I realized that I wanted it there, forever.  I wanted to make it mine, to not ever let it go.

And this is a very remarkable thing, if you stop to think about it.  In fact, as I realized some time later, it's precisely the same as falling in love.  For, to do this, your whole being must accept something new, a thing that starts out as foreign, but ends up so much a part of you that your imagination, which is pretty good, fails utterly when trying to imagine life without it."

Oh, I just loved that description.  The first thing I thought of after reading that was when I met Ryan after my mission.  In particular the night he came to my apartment and sat for hours listening to me talk about my mission.  I wasn't looking for love, I didn't even know if it was something I wanted, but after that night all I knew was that I wanted Ryan in my life.  I wanted him to listen to me and pay such close attention to me like that for the rest of my life.  And within a few short days I couldn't imagine life without Ryan by my side and I wondered how I had ever lived without him.  Good thing we got married.

But I also realized, after reading that description, that that's exactly how I felt after each of my children were born.  Here was a little person that I never met before but that I loved instantly and couldn't imagine how they had never been in my life before.  It almost feels as if my children have always been with me and that we've always known each other but that we were just separated for a while.  It's amazing that love can be so instant like that.  What a powerful thing love is.