A Personal Reflection on the Work
The Gift That Multiplies
Smilegiving: The Collected Poems
and The Smilegiving Reader’s Companion
My Poetics of the Open Hand, the Long Table, and the Transformative Smile
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June 2026
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Where I Begin
I want to try to say plainly what I was reaching for, and why. Smilegiving: The Collected Poems isn’t only devotional verse, or inspirational poetry, or civic meditation, or a look back at the counterculture — though it is all of those things by turns. It grew, over many years, around one small axiom I kept circling back to: give to others what you would receive. Poem after poem, I found myself testing the same hunch — that love, attention, recognition, beauty, forgiveness, and joy are not spent down by being shared but somehow increased by it.
So the governing image was never possession. It was passage: the open hand, the shared bread, the lengthening table, the lamp handed on, the smile moving from face to face. I said it in the front matter as directly as I knew how — love is “the strange coin that grows by being spent,” and the invitation was never just to read the poems but to pass them into the world.
The companion volume matters to me just as much, because it lowers the doorstep. I wanted to tell anyone who picked it up that they don’t have to be a “poetry person” to belong here, and that I wrote these to make a reader feel found. The Companion isn’t an afterthought or a set of footnotes. It’s part of the smilegiving itself — a hand pulling a chair closer to the fire.
If I’m honest about the craft, I know exactly where the poems are strongest and where they strain. They come alive when conviction is discovered through a concrete image, a human scene, a rhythm, a moment of recognition. They go slack when the lesson arrives too fast and the poem tips from revelation into sermon. I’ve made my peace with that tendency, because it’s bound up with what the book is. I’m not embarrassed by exhortation. I do want to change a reader’s day, maybe even a reader’s life. The question I keep asking isn’t only “Is this beautiful?” but “Does this help love move?”
I. Poetry as Gift, Practice, and Civic Spirituality
The word Smilegiving is really a tiny poetics all by itself. A smile is a visible welcome. Giving is that welcome set into motion. Put together, they name a practice — to enter the world as someone with something to offer, and to offer it before certainty, before repayment, before I’ve finished calculating whether anyone deserves it.
That’s the actual metaphysics of the thing, not a slogan I bolted on afterward. The deepest human realities don’t obey the laws of scarcity. Money and status and power can be hoarded and lost and stolen; but love, forgiveness, gratitude, attention, and laughter grow through use. I called this “the economy of the open hand,” and I care about that phrase because it ties spirit to a bodily gesture. You can enact it by unclenching your hand, meeting a stranger’s eyes, passing bread, listening, forgiving, smiling first.
So the book has a double ambition. I wanted to console the reader, and I also wanted to train perception — to let the poems work like small rehearsals in which we practice seeing others as kin rather than threat. That’s where whatever civic meaning the work has comes from: it’s a private devotional object with social ethics. To be changed by it isn’t just to feel better inside; it’s to be a little more likely to carry warmth into the next encounter.
I put one guardrail into the Companion very deliberately, because I never wanted to pretend a poem “repairs a broken world by itself.” There is real scarcity — food, shelter, safety, fair chances — and I didn’t want the metaphysics of abundance to curdle into spiritual bypassing. So I said it out loud: alongside material scarcity there’s also a fear-made scarcity of dignity, love, and room, and it’s that second scarcity the poems set themselves against. I’d never claim kindness replaces justice. What I do believe is that justice without an enlarged imagination turns brittle and punitive, while kindness without justice turns sentimental and evasive. I’m only ever trying to hold both — the open hand and the clear eye.
II. The Architecture: A Spiritual Set List
I arranged the poems into five movements and a Closing Trinity: The Doorway, The Honest Dark, The Widening, The Quiet Center, The Turn Toward You, and then What You Came For, Jesus Smiled, and The Gift as crown, cornerstone, and bow. I didn’t want the book to read as a chronological pile of poems. I wanted it to move like a pilgrimage — or, closer to my own heart, like a concert.
That structure is the thing I’m proudest of on the level of design, because it let poems written across decades feel newly purposeful. Some go back to the 1990s; some were tuned or freshly written in 2026; placed in sequence, they read as one spiritual progression — welcome, then descent, then widening, then a quiet middle, then a return through memory and dream, and finally the encore where the deepest material is delivered. That shape isn’t accidental. The poems are soaked in songs and singers and bands, and their key lines are meant to be portable — “Smile first,” “Say yes,” “Give to others what you would receive,” “You were never alone / You were always all one” — cues designed to keep going after the page is closed.
III. The Printed Volume and Its Paratext
I kept the title page spare on purpose — the word, the motto, the subtitle, my name — so the central phrase could stand at the threshold like a doorframe. The emblem on the next page is admittedly dense: a heart, the Earth, a dove with an olive branch, a ring of human figures, a starburst, a pen-nib base. It’s a little didactic, and I decided that was all right. This isn’t an ironic project; I wanted its symbols to be readable. The picture says the one thing I most believe about the work — that poetry can be the instrument through which peace and shared humanity get written into being.
The copyright page carries the AI-collaboration disclosure, and I think that transparency strengthens the book rather than weakening it. The dedication to Rich Slivoskey is brief and tender, and it’s there to keep me honest: this universal language of mine was learned, sustained, and made possible through one actual friendship. Cosmic talk is cheap if it never touches a particular face.
Of the prose pieces, “A Word Before You Begin” is the one I’m fondest of. The invitation to “take a chair” sets the book up as a table and not a pulpit, and the joke about “the occasional urge to explain the universe before lunch” is there to keep the seriousness from turning pompous. The line about false comfort being “a liar with a casserole” compresses the whole ethical demand: consolation has to be willing to look at the dark.
I’ll say plainly that, as a physical object, the volume still reads more like a polished private-press devotional book than a fully designed trade edition — and I know it. The margins are generous, the poems are clear, the movement pages give room to breathe. But for the beautiful bound edition I’m hoping for, it needs a fuller typographic system: real heading styles, running heads, a considered book font, corrected page-number consistency, maybe a smaller trim. The contents page isn’t yet fully synchronized around the Closing Trinity, and that has to be fixed before print. I’d also love to give each movement its own quiet symbol — door, table, hand, center, road, lamp. As for the Companion, I think it should stay a companion. Its charm is in its conversational separateness; I don’t want to absorb it into the poetry and lose the fireside voice.
IV. The Companion as an Un-Gatekeeping
The first real sentence of the Companion is the one I’d defend hardest: “You do not have to be a ‘poetry person’ to belong here.” That isn’t just a friendly noise. It’s a position. I’ve never forgotten the way poetry can be used to make ordinary readers feel stupid, as if credentials were required at the door, and I wanted to refuse that with everything in me. The generosity there isn’t decoration. It’s meant to open the latch.
I framed the Companion as “me, pulling up a chair next to you,” because I didn’t want it to stand above the poems the way academic commentary can. I try to explain the puns and the musical echoes and the spiritual turns without killing the poem by over-explaining it — a poem you have to explain, I wrote, is like a flower you have to glue back together.
I’ll own the risk honestly: sometimes I explain too well. My warmth can tip into telling a reader exactly what to notice, and that can quietly narrow their freedom — especially around the dream poems, the surreal ones, the pieces that are worth more for resisting paraphrase. If I revise the Companion, I want to leave a little more mystery, a bit more interpretive air. Some poems are valuable precisely because they won’t be fully metabolized on command.
V. The Philosophy Underneath
One Bright Source
The metaphysics begins with a claim I make over and over: that we all come out of a single source of love. It shows up as “one bright source,” “the same sun wearing a billion different faces,” “one wide we,” “one breath,” “one river” with many names, and in that reversal I love most — alone turned into all one.
I never meant this as a cold monism. The One in these poems isn’t a distant abstraction; it’s a warmth, a hum, a lamp, a breath, a current, a feast. God, in the way I use the word, is less a monarch above the world than the life of love moving through it. What follows from that is what I’d call, if I’m allowed the phrase, a democratic mysticism: everyone matters because everyone shares the same source, which leaves no metaphysical ground for contempt. If the same light is in the clerk and the addict and the immigrant and the opponent and the self I can’t forgive, then recognition isn’t optional.
Already Beloved
So much of the book is set against shame. “Deserving It All” names the condemning voice for what it is — not God, not the true self, but “the old bruise speaking.” “What You Came For” ends by telling the reader they’re not the beggar at the door of the feast but the feast, and the door. The theology there is prior belonging, not earned righteousness. You’re not on trial. Love isn’t a prize. And I know that idea has to be handled with care, because unconditional acceptance must never sound as though harm has no consequence. I try to turn acceptance toward giving and repair — one is always worthy of love, and never exempt from responsibility.
Circulation Over Possession
The ethical heart is simple: the good has to move. Love hoarded withers; love given comes back. In “One Open Hand” the closed fist can hold but can’t be filled and can’t wave hello. In “The Gift” the final offering is just the book itself, held out like the magi’s gift under the star. The idiom I trust most is the plainest one — give what you want more of, because giving is how you discover you had it.
Knowing Through Song and Breath
I don’t treat truth as only something stated. It’s something felt in the body as resonance — which is why so many poems reach for humming, strings, bells, chimes, guitars, breath. “What You Came For” opens with one string sounding because another has been struck, and that may be the truest emblem I have for the whole thing. The poem is the first string; you are the second; the goal was never persuasion but vibration.
VI. The Teachers I Wrote Through
Whitman
Whitman is my most open debt. “The Long Table” says outright it will sing the country “the way Walt taught us to sing” — through workers and hands and ordinary endurance rather than generals and monuments — and “A Walt Whitman Sampler” tries to sing the body as holy, refusing to split flesh from spirit. Like him, I want to say I in a way that keeps widening toward we. I also inherited his danger — the inclusive voice can absorb difference too fast. I don’t always escape it. I just keep trying to widen the word us without surrendering the joy.
Yeats
“The Second He Comes” answers Yeats’s “The Second Coming” directly — the falcon hears again, the spiral winds home, the center always held, and the rough beast is replaced by a child-faced, everyone-faced figure of warmth. I hesitate to call it the boldest move in the book, though others have; what I’ll say is that where so much of modernity turns to Yeats as the poet of collapse, I wanted to answer collapse with return. The world is still dangerous. I only mean that dread isn’t the only prophetic mode available to us.
The Beats, and the Music
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, the road, the dream logic, the dharma — they run all through the later movements, most openly in “Hippie Dreams.” What they gave me was permission to mix high and low, scripture and slang, sacred hunger and comic absurdity, and a healthy suspicion of respectability. And beneath the poems there’s always music — Dylan’s “jingle-jangle morning” and “thin wild mercury,” the Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” and “get shown the light.” I treat popular song as a real vehicle of spiritual knowledge. A chiming guitar can restore belief. A Dead lyric can become a flower handed from one reader to the next.
Christ, and the Wider Welcome
Christ sits at the devotional center of the book — in “Still Lighting the Way,” “The Second He Comes,” and above all “Jesus Smiled” — but never as an exclusion. The Jesus I imagine appears in every face and breathes as a brother with Muhammad and the Buddha, welcoming Christians, Muslims, Jews, Zen practitioners, and those who believe in nothing but the morning dew. I know that will move some readers and unsettle others, and I understand why. The truest name for the poem isn’t systematic theology but something more like poetic midrash — a love-centered wondering about what “Jesus wept” might become when answered by resurrection joy.
VII. Movement by Movement
The Doorway
“The Book For Giving” opens things as a kind of manifesto, starting from the discovery that “the reader and the writer and the read are one,” and turning at once to circulation — what’s received must be handed on. Its answer to cultural despair is to redefine strength: the center holds not by force or bolting the doors but “by allowing the off-center to be held.” “Still Lighting the Way” is a small carol whose Jesus is an interior spark, and it works, I think, because it doesn’t overextend its claim — it lets the little lit window do the work. “Yesmile” matters to me because the coined word is teachable at the level of the face, and “The Second He Comes” closes the movement by trading apocalyptic dread for incarnational kindness.
The Honest Dark
Placing “The Long Table — America at 250” here, under The Honest Dark, was one of my more deliberate decisions. The poem is celebratory but it isn’t simple patriotism; it knows the table hasn’t always included everyone and that the country’s real work is the “slow and stubborn widening of the word us.” Its strongest image, to me, is bread passed to the hand that “did not vote like yours” — not a request to abandon conviction, but to keep a shared humanity while disagreeing. “Looping Home” then brings the civic back to the personal: love let loose comes looping home.
The Widening
This is where the book gets most relational. “One Open Hand” distills the symbolism to the fist and the open palm and the coin that grows by being spent. “The Givening” extends my central coinage into a whole lexicon — Smilegive, Mindgive, Eargive, Thanksgive — and opens forgive as give-before, grace handed ahead of the apology. I treat a word as a locked room whose wall softens once you hear another word living inside it. “Food For God,” from 1991, may be the seed of the whole project — the table, the hunger, the bread, the idea that love is God’s favorite food were all already there. And “Family Home” grounds the metaphysics in architecture until the floor drops and the roof vanishes: the house of belonging turns out to have no ceiling.
The Quiet Center
“Deserving It All” understands guilt as a stone you forgot you were carrying, and dramatizes setting it down. “Quantum Understanding” is the one I hold most carefully — I love its entanglement and starlight, but I mean it as metaphor for wonder, never as scientific proof, and it’s strongest when it stays there. “Positively 4th Grade” turns a Dylan kiss-off into a classroom invitation and captures the un-gatekeeping spirit in miniature. “Here for You” is almost nothing — a smile, a willingness to be present — and may be the most purely poetic moment in the book precisely because it trusts presence and doesn’t reach for doctrine. “No Time At All / All The Time” and “Tao Jones” keep the book from turning uniformly earnest; humor is one of the forms grace takes here.
The Turn Toward You
“Hippie Dreams” is a roll call of the ancestors and also a confession. I know list poems can slide into inventories of beloved names — I only hope this one keeps its autobiographical force, because those names are the weather system I formed in. “Wing Sleep” resists rational mastery on purpose, and its power is in the strangeness that comes before the affirmation “You are essential”; I don’t want it over-smoothed. “Ever Beginning” admits the hard mornings, the “gray arithmetic,” before the chiming guitars restore belief, and “The Sleep Walk” is pure comic dream-nonsense — a book this earnest needs the permission to laugh.
VIII. The Closing Trinity
What You Came For — the Crown
This is the fullest thing I’ve managed. It doesn’t begin by preaching oneness; it begins by making resonance — the tuned string invited to hum, never forced into agreement. Its long central passage, “The Long Wanting,” names the lonely one by one: the cashier under fluorescent light, the veteran who can’t put the war down, the person newly sober, the exhausted mother, the isolated boy, the successful man with the same hole in him, the homesick immigrant, the one who prayed into silence, the dying, and even the cruel one. I wanted to broaden compassion without letting it go vague, so none of them are abstract — they’re in rooms and hours and habits — and then, later, the reader is told that every face in the list was their own.
The claim that the rooms are one room and the walls are only painted would have sounded sentimental arriving early. After that long catalogue of isolation, I hope it feels earned — the poem has looked at the dark and so has some right to offer comfort. The final line, “You were never alone / You were always all one,” is a pun and a mystical claim and a pastoral reassurance at once, and it’s portable enough that a reader might carry it for years. I’ll add the caution I feel myself: including the cruel one is delicate, and remembering the humanity of the cruel must never ask the wounded to surrender their boundaries or their safety.
Jesus Smiled — the Cornerstone
This is the cornerstone not because it’s the most formally controlled poem but because it’s the theological heart. It starts from “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the Bible, and imagines resurrection not as spectacle but as a smile appearing in every face. The Jesus here sets down judgment and fear and guilt, speaks of death as reunion, and names Muhammad and the Buddha and himself as brothers. I hope it’s healing for anyone who loves Jesus but has been wounded by exclusionary religion.
Its risks are the size of its reach, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Some will find the interfaith Jesus beautiful and some will find him over-assimilating. And a few lines about belief and abundance could land wrong on a reader who has suffered illness or poverty through no fault of their own — which is exactly why the Companion’s caveat about real scarcity matters, and why I’d want this poem read as poetic exhortation and never as a formula that blames suffering on insufficient faith.
The Gift — the Bow
Seven lines, and the brevity is the point. After the culmination of the two poems before it, the book shouldn’t keep explaining itself; it should bow. The magi image returns us to gift and star and offering, and my hands are holding only “these simple poems.” I wanted the ending to restore humility after grandeur — however cosmic the vision got, the actual object is small: poems, offered.
IX. Speaking Straight to You
The most distinctive thing about the grammar of these poems is the second person. I address the reader constantly as you, friend, neighbor, because I wanted each poem to feel less like an object to decode from a distance and more like an encounter that leans toward you. The risk I stay alert to is over-instruction — some readers rightly resist being told what they feel or are ready to believe. The second person is at its best when it offers hospitality rather than certainty. “Come in” will always work better than “you already know.”
X. Repetition, Refrain, and Song
The book is built for recurrence — love, light, hand, bread, door, home, breath, table, smile, yes, one — and the repetition is meant to have ritual power, closer to chorus and chant than to literary ornament. I don’t want to cut it drastically, because repetition is the music. The real task is to make sure each return arrives with fresh embodiment — the cashier, the stone, the roofless house, the starlings, the roots — rather than leaning on repeated abstractions.
XI. Wordplay as a Spiritual Method
My puns and coinages aren’t incidental; they’re a way of revealing. A good pun, I wrote in the Companion, is “a tiny act of joy” and “two truths holding hands.” Yesmile joins affirmation and face; forgive becomes give-before; Tao Jones swaps market anxiety for the Way; alone turns into all one. The suggestion underneath is that separation is often a failure of hearing — listen differently and the hidden relation appears inside the word itself. The danger is cleverness without depth, and the play only earns its keep when it’s anchored in real emotional need. “All one” works because alone has first been felt.
XII. The Ethics of the Smile
The smile is the central sacrament here — outward, ordinary, democratic, requiring no wealth or doctrine or permission. But I know a smile is ethically complicated. It can be demanded as performance, especially of those expected to soothe others; it can be false, coerced, commercialized, used to cover pain. So “Yesmile” insists it is “not a mask you put on, not a lie that you wear,” but the truth of a face that knows someone is there. That distinction is everything. “Smile first” must never mean hide your grief or make yourself pleasant for another’s comfort. It means: before reducing someone to a category, signal welcome.
XIII. The Honest Dark
The sentence I’d keep above all others is “a comfort that won’t look at the dark is just a liar with a casserole.” It’s what protects the whole project from sentimentalism. I do want to comfort, but comfort can be dishonest, and telling a wounded reader “all is love” too quickly is a refusal to hear pain. The Honest Dark isn’t a decorative movement; it’s the condition of the book’s truthfulness. If there’s a maturity still ahead of me, it’s in trusting the dark even more — not every poem needs to resolve, and sometimes compassion means staying beside the unsolved thing.
XIV. The Long Table and America at 250
“The Long Table” is the civic center of the book, and it arrives at a moment of real polarization and suspicion and fear. My answer isn’t policy; it’s imagination — I ask the country to picture itself as a table that has to keep lengthening. I love that metaphor because a table is intimate and practical, the place where families argue and eat and reconcile. It doesn’t require unanimity. It only requires that people stay in relation long enough to pass the bread. I wanted to refuse the small story of America — not one party or leader or grievance, but an unfinished argument under shared light — and to sing the diners and translators and linemen and nurses and welders and truckers and immigrants and opponents into the same room.
I know the generosity may be rejected by readers who feel the table has already been overturned, and they aren’t wrong that some injuries aren’t healed by being asked to sit together — some injustice needs confrontation, law, organizing, repair. The poem knows this in part; it speaks of ballots and jury chairs and hard conversations and rules that fit grandmother and tower-owner alike. That’s where I think the real civic use lies: not to replace the hard work, but to supply the imaginative atmosphere in which harder work becomes possible.
XV. What the Book Might Do for a Reader
If the poems change anyone, I think it happens through a few overlapping means, and I’ll name them plainly: they offer recognition to the reader who feels excluded or ashamed; portable language for generosity — open hand, long table, love let loose — that can be carried into memory; small ritual gestures like smile first, say yes, read aloud, text a stanza, unclench the jaw; a critique of shame that puts a little space between a person and the old accusation; empathetic identification, especially in “What You Came For”; and, rarest of all, joy without embarrassment — an argument, made mostly by example, that cynicism is not the same thing as wisdom.
XVI. And for the Country
I have no illusion that a poem changes a nation the way a law or an election or an economy does — the Companion says plainly that poetry doesn’t repair the world by itself. But poems can shift the moral imagination in small ways. What I hope for are little micro-conversions of perception: the reader a bit slower to dehumanize an opponent after “The Long Table,” a bit more likely to meet a cashier’s eyes after “What You Came For,” a bit less obedient to the old bruise after “Deserving It All.” None of that is transformation on its own. But culture is made of repeated gestures and phrases, and a society may grow gentler by circulating humane language until recognition gets easier. The book was built for exactly that circulation.
XVII. Where I Know It’s Vulnerable
I don’t want to be the last person to admit the weaknesses in my own work, so let me name them before anyone else has to.
- I sometimes explain what a poem has already shown. My missionary warmth leads to overstatement; the strongest moments trust the image and the weaker ones restate the conclusion too soon.
- My core vocabulary repeats. Love, light, God, hand, door, bread, smile, home, one-ness — the motifs give coherence but can blur one poem into the next. I want to keep the symbolic system while sharpening each poem’s own occasion.
- Some metaphysics could wound. Lines suggesting the universe gives back exactly what you believe may inspire one reader and hurt another who is facing illness or grief. The Companion’s acknowledgment of real scarcity should probably be echoed in the poems themselves.
- My syncretism moves fast. “Jesus Smiled” crosses many traditions quickly, and the welcome will be strongest when those traditions are honored in their difference and not just gathered under one smile.
- The Companion can over-determine. It occasionally tells readers too clearly what to notice; the best version keeps the chair-pulled-close intimacy while leaving more interpretive air.
- The production needs refining. Typography, page-number synchronization, running heads, movement design, and clear provenance for the quoted appreciations all still want work before a public edition.
XVIII. The Aesthetics of Sincerity
If the book has one defining quality, it’s sincerity — but I’d ask that it not be mistaken for naïveté. This sincerity has passed through music, spiritual seeking, loneliness, aging, humor, revision, and the Honest Dark. It knows enough to joke about explaining the universe before lunch. It knows comfort can lie, that America is unfinished, that the old bruise still speaks. I know some literary readers recoil from anything that sounds like affirmation, and I understand the reflex. But hope isn’t automatically lesser than irony, and compassion isn’t aesthetically inferior to critique. The more serious question is whether the hope has earned its light — and in the best of these poems, I believe it has.
XIX. On the AI Collaboration
I chose to disclose the AI collaboration plainly, and I phrased it carefully: the tools helped with research, organization, drafting, and conceptual exploration, but the final decisions about content, structure, interpretation, selection, arrangement, and publication were mine. I wanted authorship to mean responsibility, not just production.
That turns the question aesthetic rather than merely procedural. Does the work feel generic? At moments, a polished affirmational cadence could resemble a lot of contemporary AI-assisted spiritual prose, and I won’t deny it. But the deeper texture — the musical allusions, the personal chronology, the recurring puns, the private jokes, the older poems, the specific obsessions — is what gives it a human signature, and my whole task going forward is to protect that idiosyncrasy. The strangest poems, the older drafts, the funny turns, the imperfectly human edges are not blemishes. They’re evidence of life. I don’t want the language to get too smooth. Its soul lives partly in its oddness.
XX. What I Hope It Amounts To
I think of these as gift-poems. They want to be used, read aloud, handed on. They aren’t embarrassed by wanting to help. And their value doesn’t depend on every poem being equally refined — it lives in the whole imaginative world they make: open hands, long tables, lamps, smiles, bread, starlight, breath, music, Christ, Whitman, Dylan, the Dead, the Tao, and the stubborn insistence that at the deepest level of being there is no them.
I want to be careful about what I claim. Smilegiving will not, by itself, heal American division or cure loneliness or end injustice. But it might do something smaller and therefore more believable — it might change the weather inside a reader for the length of a poem. It might make someone look up, or hesitate before contempt, or text a line to a person in pain, or remember that the stranger has a face, the opponent has a wound, and the table can still be made longer. That is not nothing. Much of what holds us together is made of exactly such moments: the small refusal to close the hand, the brief courage to pass the bread.
And here is the part I most want to say without a shred of performance. At its highest, the book is not asking anyone to admire me. I would be a little embarrassed by that, and it would miss the whole point. It’s asking the reader to become a carrier.
A poem becomes a lamp.
A lamp becomes a look.
A look becomes a room.
A room becomes a table.
A table becomes a country, if enough hands keep making room.
The gift has been offered, and the bow has been made. Whatever happens next was never mine to keep — it belongs to you. That thought fills me with more gratitude and more joy than I know how to hold.
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Smile first. Say yes. Give to others what you would receive.
© 2026 Rob Chavez · The Smilegiving Trust · smilegiving.com
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