One of my favorite things is, when reading, I come across a passage that metaphorically hits me right in the center of my chest.  It doesn't have to have great insight, or a compelling message, sometimes it's just in the combination of words and imagery.  Sometimes it's because it fits a longing into language without it minimizing the longing (which, believe it or not, is a very hard thing to do).  Sometimes it awakens a longing I never knew I had, and other times it's just so beautiful it makes me ache, and sometimes it spells out so perfectly where I am.  C. S. Lewis calls this Joy.  John Eldredge calls it Desire. Neither of those words are right for it, because really there isn't a word that's perfectly it.  It just is.  (Lately I've been seeing holes, holes in language, holes in "reality", holes in myself.)  So, this just happened a little while ago, while reading Perelandra.

Now that I've built it up so much, you probably have these high expectations for the passage I'm about to share with you.  And you'll probably be disappointed.  But that's okay.   Because things speak differently to everyone.  That's the beauty of art.  No one ever reads the same book, or sees the same painting, or hears the same song.  But that doesn't alter or diminish the beauty of sharing these things as we can.  So here it is, love the poem it writes for you.

"There is no moon in that land, no star pierces the golden roof.  But the darkness was warm.  Sweet new scents came stealing out of it.  The world had no size now.  Its boundaries were the length and breadth of his own body and the little patch of soft fragrance which made his hammock, swaying ever more and more gently.  Night covered him like a blanket and kept all loneliness from him.  The blackness might have been his own room.  Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched the stem."
~ Perelandra by C. S. Lewis