Hal Kahn, a longtime newspaper writer and editor, seeks beauty every day in Santa Fe, N.M. These photos are his Valentines to a world that will go on after he is gone.

Hal believes the garden shows us how interdependent all of life is. To reap nature's glories, we need to nourish and nurture the lives of those we love. Flowers pushing through the earth give us reason to have faith -- or at least hope -- in forces we cannot see.

The monk, Thomas Merton, put it this way: “To place your faith in visible things is to live in despair.”

Gardeners may think that they are feeding and nurturing their plants, but that is hubris. It is the gardener whose soul is fed by the garden. No matter how our minds create reasons to explain our daily striving, flowers show us that our motives are based in our cells.

Each of us seeks different nutrients -- be they as basic as sunlight and water or as complex as love. But when we stop searching for that which sustains us, we die.

“The aim of life,” wrote the novelist Henry Miller, “is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
Hal will help you create lasting reminders of the blessings in your life.