The Perennial Heart, A Sacred Returning

People have tried to name this kind of love for thousands of years. The mystics spent lifetimes writing toward it.

Our poetry book, “The Perennial Heart, A Sacred Returning,” is that same love, written in a language sacred love understands and speaks.

469 poems, one every single day of the 16 months the love of my life and I spent separated on two continents. What lives inside these poems is the mysticism of devotion made plain enough to touch and feel. Soul recognition in its purest form. Love that was already true before the bodies carrying it existed. The ache of longing turned into something sacred. The slow work of coming home to yourself while you wait to literally come home to someone else.

This is what the mystics felt, written down in words a modern heart can receive.

If some part of you has always known that love goes deeper than anything the ordinary words allow, this book was written for you as well.

Some loves feel older than the two people living them. You meet someone, and something in you recognizes them right away, the way you recognize a place you have never been to and yet have somehow always known. That is how our love story started.

In the spring of 2019, Michelle and I found each other through a screen, two strangers who had no earthly reason to ever meet. She was in Canada, and I was in Finland. What passed between us turned into something neither of us could name, a pull older than both of us, the kind of Knowing that lives beyond thought. By that summer we had said the words out loud. By December, I crossed the world so we could finally live near each other, and for forty-three days we got to hold what we had only been writing and dreaming about.

Then came the goodbye at the airport. What was meant to be a short separation stretched into sixteen months on opposite sides of the world, across different continents and time zones, carrying the same longing, the same love, and the same faith. No one knew when it would end, or how we would ever close the distance between us.

But something in me Knew that I would write Michelle one poem for every day we were apart, and I knew that one day I would gather them all into a book. In the end, the time we couldn’t visit or see each other lasted sixteen months, and this poetry book is what those months created. 469 poems, one for each day of love, of longing, of healing, of surrender, of grief, of patience, of devotion. Some poems were made in moments of grace, when the love felt infinite and the distance felt thin. Others were made during the heavy nights of not knowing, when the way forward was invisible and all we had was Trust.

This is what it sounds like to love someone across time and space. To keep your heart open when every circumstance is working to close it. To wait, to trust, to keep writing, and to hold on to what the Soul already Knows.

Before you decide, you’re welcome to step inside. Here you can read the introduction and the first five poems for free.