Dear Erika,

I am sitting here in the living room and you are around the corner at the dining room table, playing. I love to listen to you this way. With your imagination, you are never bored for long. At the moment you are talking to your latest imaginary friend "Justin" and, as usual, he is being silly and you are laughing at him. We just got home from a birthday party and you are telling him who was there and what you did. Slowly more people are joining you and you are all their voices. The voices of the whole world in this small girl. Sometimes, no matter how closely I listen, I can't get the story line that you are following and I love that. You are in your own world, totally engrossed in something that is beyond me; living your own life within the limits of these walls.

Before you were born I read this poem by Kahlil Gibran and it struck a chord with me:

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Now, more than four years later, I see Truth in this that I never could have imagined when I first read those words. I am constantly amazed at how you and your sister can be such a part of me, your Dad, this family, and how much you are each simultaneously a person all your own. Your path lies before you, limitless. And I feel so honored to walk with you some of the way.