Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love . . . When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

In the lives of saints I look for confirmation of excess. To them it is not strange to spend nights on a mountain or to forgo food. For them, the visionary and the everyday coincide. Above all, they have no domestic virtues, preferring intensity to comfort. Despite their inhospitable ways, they ferment with unexpected life, like those bleak railway cuttings that host horizontal dandelions. They know there is no passion without pain.

She grew in secret, away from their eyes. Outwardly she was obedient and loving, but inside she was feeding a hunger—

On the one side there were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed bat all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house.On the other there were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night.

I'm never tempted by God but I like his trappings. Not tempted but I begin to understand why others are. With this feeling inside, with this wild love that threatens, what safe places might there be? Where do you store gunpowder? How do you sleep at night again? If I were a little different I might turn passion into something holy and then I would sleep again.