The Dancer in the Heart

"The Dancer in the Heart" is a collection of poems with painted illustrations by the author. Stephen Abhaya says, in the introduction to "The Dancer in the Heart", "Whenever I fell in love, I thought the inspiration for any love poem was the specific woman involved. I began to notice that the poems were not dependent on a Her, or a She, as the source of the love. I discovered love to be the essence of my own nature, to be the supreme reality. I love, whether a She is there or not, or even when my affections are not returned in kind. Four relationships and the love poems they engendered over many years are each represented by a different section of this book. Throughout, my attention progressed from relating to a woman as the object of my love, to knowing the source of it. The relationships may have been inconstant, love itself has not been. As neither source nor object, the She, the You, the Her, that the poem is seemingly about, is both part of, and the same as, the eternal source of love, whether we call it 'God' or 'the other', and as such is inclusive of all.