Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up, but give it a rest. You're gonna die one day.

The fact is that I've been loved. If I ever really had to put my finger on what's made, what's blessed my life to the extent that it's been blessed, it's the fact that I have been loved.

It's one of those things where if you've got it, it builds. They say it takes money to make money.

I was a little kid who was surrounded by people who loved me, people who thought I was smart and funny and cute and just showered me and nourished me with love.

I think what happens is you get older and even though I went through a period and had a lesson where I was anything but lovable.

Even then I can remember my father saying to me, you are a little insufferable prick, but I love you and I love you no matter what, no matter how horrible you act to your sister or no matter what bullshit you pull at school that gets me called in for these meetings.

I'll always love you if you murder someone, I'll love you. I can remember that. I can remember the pain in his eyes in some situations when he was saying that.

As much as I pretended I didn't give a shit, I did and here I am 52 years of age and it brings me to the edge of tears just remembering those moments.

The thing is, I feel uncomfortable admitting this to you because it sounds as if I think I deserved it or something and I did deserve it.

And so do you and so does every other little kid who has ever been born deserves to be loved.

No kid doesn't deserve love. Just like no sprouting tree doesn't deserve rain and sunshine.

You know, we're born to want those things and we're designed to need them and in a world that's functioning properly, we receive them.

And then once you've received it at that essential age, then you're going to be okay.

It's like colostrum. For those of you who don't know, colostrum is a substance that is in a woman's breast milk for the first few days when she's breastfeeding the baby and it's rich with immune building substances, things that will bacteria that will colonize the baby's intestines.

And once those good bacteria are in there that come from the mother, then they take over the intestines and then when bad bacteria come, as they always do, it's occupied.

The baby is able to defend itself against those bad bacteria, the negative pathogenic bacteria.

But if the baby doesn't get the colostrum, right, if the baby doesn't have a mother, the mother died or the mother doesn't want to breastfeed and so she gives it cow milk or formula or whatever, the baby doesn't get that original colonizing beneficial bacteria from his mother.

And that leaves them vulnerable to the bad, the pathogenic bacteria that come in later because that space isn't occupied, right?

And I think it's the same thing psychologically. If you're loved as an infant, as a little child, if you're told that you're smart and you're beautiful and you're wonderful, then part of you will always believe that no matter what you're told later in life, no matter who rejects you, no matter what school doesn't let you in, no matter what jobs you get fired from, no matter what marriage you have.

No matter what marriages fall apart, an essential part of you will always believe that you are lovable, that you are good, you are decent, no matter what mistakes you've made.

That's a beautiful thing when it works and when it doesn't work, it's incredibly tragic because you can see, look around you at people who were not loved as children or even worse who were abused as children abandoned.

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