I spent the morning looking for a special gift for someone I will dearly miss, a glass teapot to complement the flowering teas I found for him in early March.  I thought about the last time I searched for gifts to express my love, and how poorly they were received.  The biggest fear while searching for a gift is that the love will not translate.  Sometimes, I am overtaken with this paranoid fear that I will buy something horribly stupid, and I won’t realize it until I hand it to the other person.

Giving random gifts has always been a big part of me.  When I was young, I made greeting cards and crafts for my family.  I gave impromptu gifts to friends at school.  Often, I would draw their portrait and surpise them with it.  I just wanted to see them experience unexpected delight.  On holidays, I would arrive at school with a bag of little presents for everyone I knew.  Classmates who had only shared a few words with me would smile when I gave them something silly, like bath salts or chocolate.  I would think, “I bet they had no idea they were special to me, and now they know.”

When I was nineteen, I baked a pumpkin pie for my boyfriend (of only two months), carried it on the bus, and walked more than a mile to bring it to his house.  The filling had not quite set.  It was so awful.  “Here, my love… I partially baked you a pumpkin pie and walked across town with it like a lovestruck moron.”  Now it just makes me laugh.  That was so me.

You never know how someone will receive a gift.

But the real gift is not the object.  The real gift is the time spent wandering in search of the object with nothing but kind thoughts of the other person filling your mind and stirring your heart.  Expecting nothing more than a chance at giving them a moment of unforeseen happiness.

Spending two hours in the bookstore envisioning her well being, imagining her feeling recompense and a sense of being understood perhaps, wondering what would make her smile, remembering the artistic photo of her beautiful eye upon finding a book whose cover depicted perfection with the image of an eye gleaming gold with divinity.  Knowing that the first words out of his mouth would probably be, “You should rip it apart,” and hoping she would.  “Now that would be perfection,” I whispered.

The hours spent imagining joy or healing for someone, no matter what the actual gift, never go unreceived.  The object itself may fail to convey your love or make amends, but those hours, they cannot fail.  The intention that someone experience joy, they will hear it and experience it somewhere deep inside.  The real gift, they receive with their heart.

My heart is pulled towards harmony, love, and mutual understanding.  Not the agitated kind of pull that cannot sit with exile.  A gentle, indomitable pull.  Overtures of peace, both material and spiritual, are like waves of a warm sea tugging at the sand, taking immense joy in knowing that harmony will come with time.

Giving up on the dream of harmony with any particular person feels something like abandoning them, something I can’t bring myself to do.  No one is an island.

Objects, on the other hand, I have about given up on.  I seek them out now only to spend those precious hours in the store meditating on the delight of someone I love.

I had two beautiful packages of tea.  One is now in gentle hands.  The other, once intended for the Rivierra on the one day friendship seemed possible, I toss to the waves of that warm sea.