You know, O my God, I have never desired anything but to love You, I am ambitious for no other glory. Your love has gone before me, and it has grown with me, and now it is an abyss whose depths I cannot fathom. Love attracts love and my love leaps toward yours; it would like to fill the abyss which attracts it, but alas; it is not even a drop of dew lost in the ocean! For me to love You as You love me, I would have to borrow your own Love.
One day as I was about to step on a dry leaf, I saw the leaf in the ultimate dimension. I saw that it was not really dead, but that it was merging with the moist soil in order to appear on the tree the following spring in another form. I smiled at the leaf and said, "You are pretending." Everything is pretending to be born and pretending to die, including that leaf. The Buddha said, "When conditions are sufficient, the body reveals itself, and we say the body exists. When conditions are not sufficient, the body cannot be perceived by us, and we say the body does not exist." The day of our "death" is a day of our continuation in many other forms.
~ from LIVING BUDDHA, LIVING CHRIST by Thich Nhat Hanh
