I love Maria for many reasons, but I think one of the most important is her passion for life. Maria was often ridiculed or belittled for the enthusiasm and empathy she brings to all living things. She is still wary of showing it sometimes.

Wherever we go, she sees things I do not see, and points them out and wonders about them and sees the miracle of life and nature in the small things as well as the big things – in a crow or a spider or a leave or a footprint or a bone in the woods, or a tree that speaks to her her, or a dog or a donkey or a sheep or a goose.

“Am I bothering you?,” she will often ask, expecting me to be rolling my eyes or annoyed. Every ride or walk with her is an adventure, a celebration of life in all of its diversity and complexity. “Is this too much for you?”

No, it isn’t.

When we met, I had lost my passion for life, for love, for sex, for nature. I had even sent all my animals away, it wasn’t because I didn’t love them, it was because I did. Fortunately for me,  she is passionate about me almost as much as for an octopus, and that is a lot.

She was stunned that I wanted to walk through the aquarium with her the other day, that I didn’t think she was yammering, that I wasn’t irritated or anxious to go home. She sometimes is embarrassed by her own enthusiasm and carried it alone for so many years.

It is true that I sometimes can’t keep up with her, I am wary and learned early on to bury my passion for life, although it never quite abandoned me. It just went into hibernation and waited for the princess to come and give me a kiss.

I don’t quite know how to tell her  passion for life is wonderful, that she saved my spirit, brought me back to life, re-ignited my own passion for living and my fading determination to live a meaningful life.

I do not have her passion, or her sense of wonder and joy. I got too closed up. But I am opening, slowly and cautiously.

Maria is  honest and demands honesty, and I have no choice but to be honest and open with her, as I am learning to do with the world.

We face the truth about each other and increasingly share this passion for life, it is like a good virus, it is contagious.  I think I was sleepwalking through so much of my life, I had given up on living it.

Over these years, I have felt the scales and dust and hardness breaking off, the walls opening, the heart and soul singing out to the world that it is a gift to be alive, every minute, every day, every place there is something to look at and see and exclaim.

There is color and light in my life now, every day, everywhere I look.

This afternoon, a tableau of this passion, Maria brought her dog food bowl full of pineapple, stale bread, lettuce,  carrots and celery – she makes this special concoction every day – and the animals gather around her, they are gentle and patient with her.

She praises the donkeys for lifting their heads about the sheep to get the best stuff, she talks to each sheep and asks them how they are, and praises them for being so patient.

Here, I saw her passion for life right in front of me and my camera, and I was grateful to take this picture. A passion for life is a wonderful gift, although she has no idea how wonderful her own gifts are, she had to hide them for so many years.

In the car, I am sometimes overwhelmed with this love and gratitude, I go silent and she looks at me carefully to see if anything is wrong. Sometimes I just don’t know what to say, and I just take her hand.

A passion for life is a rare things, and beautiful thing.