Passing Love

Nicole-Marie Handy has loved all things French since she was a child. After the death of her best friend, determined to get out of her rut of ordinary living and experience something new, she goes to Paris, leaving behind work, ailing parents and a proposal from her married lover. While there, Nicole chances upon an old photo of her father--lovingly inscribed, in his hand, to a woman Nicole has never heard of. What starts as a vacation for Nicole quickly becomes an investigation into her relationship to this mystery woman. Moving back and forth in time between the sparkling Paris of today and the jazz-fueled city filled with expatriates in the 1950s, PASSING LOVE is the story of two women dealing with love lost, secrets, and betrayal . . . and how the City of Lights may hold all of the answers.

Wanda the wanderer, practitioner of the movable feast, barroom pick-up artist, skilled technician at electronics and seduction, is a sexual adventuress who works as a repair and installer technician for a major telephone company. At an earlier age, just at the physical developmental stage where she was entering into puberty and her hormones are starting to run away with her, while on a road trip with her parents, staying in her own room at sleazy motel, she overhears a couple going at it hot and heavy in the next room over on the other side from her parents room. As Wanda listens, captivated, she longs to join the couple in the next room in their thrashing orgasmic encounter. These experiences have transformed Wanda’s life. As the second stage of her life opens, Wanda is now a mature women in her early thirties. Wanda has become fully dedicated at and skillful in the art of seduction and the quick get away without complications. Electronics is her profession and seduction is her hobby - she is dedicated to excellence in both her profession and avocation. She has no desire or intention to fall in love or get married. Both would de-rail her chosen life pattern. She is fully aware that she might find herself alone at the end of her life but she does not care. Wanda is fully ready to end up alone at the end of her life. It is a price she is willing to pay to live her life the way she prefers and wants to live it. Wanda and Chuck met each other under an assumed identity. Chuck's assumption and Wanda's carefully crafted procedure to avoid complications are both blown apart when they meet the next day on the installation project. Chuck is pleasantly surprised to find his lover again. Wanda is totally rattled by the unexpected complication. Things go smoothly. The two grow to like each other. More than just like each other. They make love (on the top of the completed relay tower - fresh roof tar end up on their backs). Wanda violates her rule of not having sex with a man more than once. Chuck is falling in love with Wanda. This is the kind of complication Wanda wants to avoid. Though she likes Chuck enough to violate one of her cardinal rules, Wanda still doesn't want to give up her lifestyle. Will Wanda give up her hedonistic lifestyle to be with Chuck forever? Will true and deeper love will emerge on Wanda's part and whether she and Chuck will come to be together for life or will Wanda's love of the open road triumph over love and take her away from real love and leave her on the road forever moving toward a horizon that keeps receding from her?

It is an analytical view of some of the concepts and aspects of life according to recent scientific studies that changed my consideration of some of these concepts and led me to the discovery of these secrets. It is literary and social in the light of opinions, the great philosophers' theories, the writers' words, and the psychologists' ideas about concepts and explains them. I tried to understand and comprehend the wide knowledge base about how to behave better and find more wealth of realism and much happiness in life.

There is something for everyone in this insightful book .

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.

Becoming fully human is a lifelong journey. It can also be an incredible adventure. Here internationally respected depth psychologist, spiritual guide, and personal transformation coach David Benner explores the mysteries of human being and becoming. Drawing on insights from science, philosophy, and forty years of experience integrating psychology and spirituality, he presents concrete steps for living in ways that move us toward wholeness. He also draws on mysticism, the perennial wisdom tradition, interfaith dialogue, and the contemplative Christian tradition, developing a robust spirituality that reveals how we can align ourselves with God's presence in the world.

Preface I explicitly do not affirm the truth of any statement made or implied herein concerning any actual people, including myself; or any actual relationships, including my own; or any concrete situations depicted. Everything I have written is either about or based upon my perceptions, memories, imagining, suppositions, assessments of poetic and dramatic appropriateness, and the like, all such, qua sources of factual truth, being notoriously fallible. The only truth that I do affirm herein is that of the universals that can be abstracted from the particulars of my subjective experience, the universalscall them poetic truthswhereby my audience can better understand and perfect themselves as I, hopefully, have been able to do for myself in the living and subsequent describing of all that follows. If anything I have written happens to occasion any people pain, I express in anticipation my deepest compassion; such people must know, however, that I would not have written as I have if I did not suppose that I would thereby have caused, in potentiality, far greater good than harm. Bear Valley Springs August, 2011