Prelude

Grief is a thing a Zen master would define as a good teacher, like pain.

It is, for me, not something well understood. I dealt with it in the usual poor ways; drink, sex, drugs, anger, overwork- essentially, all sorts of denial. Even tried religion- it actually helped but much of the pain was of my making and not God's fault.

I kept having dreams that woke me. At first I thought it was the booze or guilt from bad living.

I started recording them on bits of paper in piles stuffed in a folder marked "nut case file."

As the grief passed I started to organize the piles into notes and the notes into pages.

Then one day I read an old Arabic tale of a man who became mad for a love. I then decided to put the pages into a book form in the hope of at least acknowledging a part of me that had been hidden. What I found was a book as mysterious as the nights that it came from.

I found relief from a pain by it's expression and discovered there is nothing wrong in a madness for love.