She adored light in all its forms—morning beams, the shimmer on waves, the shimmer in

others. She’d gather sea moss, starfish, and shells, and adorn herself like a creature of the

tide. The village seamstress, Mar, was inspired by her joy and began adding sea accents to

her once plain swaddles.

Bronzed by the sun, dressed in a light linen shirt and his wide buri hat made of woven dried leaves,

he spent his life tending to our family’s land—a lush paradise near the base of the mountain forest.

There, he raised rice, cassava, vegetables, and fruit trees like mango, soursop, and tamarind. His

companions were the carrabaos, steady and strong like him, always nearby, always watching.

Then came the seventieth boat.

They presented it to Mar’s father—a gift of legacy wrapped in wood and sap. And as the family held

seashells to their ears in ceremony, Jose held one too… and heard something.

A faint sound. A tremble. A whisper of arrival.

It was a moment of divine welcome—the gift of sound entering a life once shaped by silence.

One day, a young girl arrived by boat. Her name was Felice. Sun-kissed and spirited, she came with

eyes wide and wonder-filled, and her visit to Mar bloomed into something eternal. They became

sisters of soul—sharing herbs, stories, laughter, and long silences where only the sea spoke.

She cultivated spaces where people could sit in slowness, where a mother and child could

share an unhurried cup of tea and remember how to speak without words. Where elders

could cry without explaining. Where artists could unfreeze their creativity, and where

wanderers, like she once was, could pause and feel themselves again.

She never married young. Love, she said, wasn’t something to chase. But one morning, as

she scaled tuna under the rising sun, a fisherman from a distant village laid eyes on her

strength, and it stirred something within him. He didn’t court her with poetry or pearls. He

showed up with silence, helping her unload baskets and stitch broken nets. In time, she gave

him her heart the same way she sold fish—without pretense, just presence.

As a child in Spain, Jaime would watch his father prepare for meetings with dignitaries and

diplomats. He admired him—how his suits fit like armor, how the scent of pomade lingered

in the hallway long after he left. At seven, Jaime began slicking his own hair with water and

mimicking his father’s gait, trying on the gravitas of importance.

He didn’t arrive expecting conversation. He came because he noticed how the air shifted when Maya entered a room. Over time, he began to understand her—her rhythm, her silences, her expressive glances. They grew close. Not by exchanging words, but by exchanging trust.

It had only hidden for a time. Or perhaps, it had been tucked inside the quiet things—the

small joys she had stopped noticing. The scent of tea. The soft weight of a favorite quilt. The

way her hands still moved gently over pages of her journal.

She thought about all the days she had searched for signs, prayed for clarity. All the

moments she believed she had been in the dark.

For months, her nights were filled with dreams of paths, crossways, and countless doors—some ornate, others weathered. Each door pulsed with a unique energy. Some

buzzed with urgency, others shimmered with illusions.

A few whispered promises that felt hollow when her hand reached near the handle.

But now it was Spring, and something within her stirred. As she opened her book to press a

fresh bloom, a note fluttered from its folds. The ink was faded, the paper worn—but the

words were familiar. Not recently written, yet undeniably hers:

*“You are never alone in your silence. You are being sculpted by stillness into something

sacred.”*

She returned every morning to sit with the flower, and over the weeks, the village noticed something begin to shift. Children laughed louder. Neighbors shared stories more freely. People lingered in one another’s presence without rushing to the next task. Liora never said a word about the bloom, but somehow, its presence was felt in every conversation, in every shared loaf of bread, in every act of care.

Her grandparents had passed into the beyond, leaving behind a quiet legacy—one that lived not in wealth but in the hands of those they had once called friends. And so, Ptolem walked, gathering what remained of their world, weaving together the fragments of a life once lived.

An elder woman, gentle and composed, offered her a silken cloth, embroidered with threads that shimmered like the first light of dawn. “Your grandmother stitched this on the eve of my wedding,” she said with a quiet smile. “It carries her prayers.”

Amara stood at the edge of the hill, overlooking the valley below. She had always known this land—its rivers, its fields, the quiet resilience of its people. She had spent her life watching, listening, understanding the unspoken currents that moved beneath the surface of things.

But today, something felt different.

There was a shift—a force rising, a call that could no longer be ignored.

And then, she heard it.

The sharp, piercing cry of an eagle echoed through the sky, its wings cutting through the dawn light as it soared above her. It was not just a sound—it was a summons.

“The world will tell you that faith must be proven, that trust must be earned, that we must see before we believe. But we have gathered here today because we know that is not the way of the heart.

We believe first. And in doing so, we create what has always been waiting for us.”

Silence settled over the room, not empty, but full. The kind of silence that speaks before words do, the kind that tells you: You are exactly where you were meant to be.

The gathering had been a vision long in the making, a dream that had taken root in the unseen, nurtured by faith and the quiet whisper of possibility. And now, on the morning of its unfolding, the absence of those she held closest weighed softly on her heart—not as sorrow, but as an ache of longing.

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, listening. The love of those not present was not lost, nor diminished. It was here, interwoven into the very air she breathed, the very space she had created.

If spring were to rush forward, the blossoms would be too fragile, too unready for the fullness of the new season. The pause was not an absence of movement—it was preparation, a gentle unfolding in its own time.

Daisy had long forgotten what it felt like to wake up with a light heart. The weight of the world had settled into her bones—news headlines filled with sorrow, the endless demands of work, the quiet ache of loneliness that pressed in during the still hours of the night. Morning had lost its magic. It had become just another threshold to cross into the same noise, the same exhaustion, the same heaviness.

But the God/Spirit/Universe listens, even when we do not realize we are asking.

“The world is stitched together by the hands of dreamers,” her grandmother would say, her voice a melody woven with wisdom. “Some carve their dreams into the mountains, shaping castles that kiss the clouds. Others lay stone upon stone, raising basilicas where souls gather in reverence. And some, like us, dream upon the waters, letting the tides carry our longing to distant lands.”

She watched as the wind, though softened, still wove through the rain, shifting its patterns, making it swirl and twirl in ways it wouldn’t have on its own. She noticed how the trees, after swaying wildly in the wind’s embrace, now stretched their roots deeper, drinking in the rain’s gift.

For the first time, she saw it—the rhythm, the give and take.