I named my publishing company, NOJ Publications, after my husband, his named turned backwards.
I write about love, committed and constant, persevering and sustaining, which he has given me.
My stories and novels express what I know and have learned in relationship with my husband.
Love holds a most transforming power.
It dispenses hope beyond our wildest dreams.
In a culture where society has primed most of us for rejection, the experience of someone opening their heart and saying, ‘yes,’ to us, who we are and displaying affection frightens us terribly.
Love incites fear in hearts more so than rejection.
Where rejection provides the perfect excuse for us to grow angry and resentful, love melts away our reasons for despair and the need to complain and show condescension and express doubt.
Love reveals the thick defenses covering the wounds of our hearts and souls.
Love shows us how much we yearn for goodness and redemption. Love brings us alive, betrays our vulnerabilities and our need for intimacy.
Love makes us whole and in so doing exposes our inner child.
Many people, men and women, avoid intimacy as if it is a plague.
They refuse love in favor or relationships that carry the word “doomed” in every aspect.
The French word for sex, la petite mort, means the little death. Each time we truly make love either in the physical form or spiritual, a little of who we are dies.
I like to think that in the physical climax where souls merge that love, when present, transforms our doubts and hurts, deep seated resentments and shades of long standing despair into grace, mercy, joy and gratitude.
These are the vicissitudes of emotions, the various hues of human experience I have undergone within the crucible of my marriage.
The affections my husband has expressed, the constancy of acceptance and commitment to me, not for what I do and have done, but who I am, the dimensions of which I have at many times and still loathe, has stripped me of the callouses hiding festering scars that found healing in the light of his love.
For this I am forever thankful, in this lifetime and those of the world to come.
The stories I write exemplify my gratitude to him and the divining movements of the universe that brought us together and bound our hearts and souls.