These 37 essays are rooted in the inspiration I experience in working with my patients and with participants at the Opening the Heart Workshop.

Though they are all very different in tone and content, they are all about love in the small places, off center stage.

They may have been about lifting a hosta leaf and finding a spider's web in diamonds of morning dew, or about watching new grass grow, holding a weeping patient in my office, watching a man outside my office drag his leg behind as he carries groceries home.

They are all, I think, small love stories.