The wisdom of Louise Hay and the power of affirmations are woven in this tale of everyday magic. Here’s Jonathan—an artist living in the depth of his despair who is about to discover hope in the eyes of a young girl.

Jonathan hadn’t always been a fractious blind man, railing at neighbors and deliverymen. There was a time when he was the talk of the town, a successful artist, part of a coterie of attractive, chic young men. He’d had shows in New York and Los Angeles and the capitals of Europe. His photograph seemed always to be in The New York Times Style section—smiling at this party or that opening; always dapper and handsome, always in the front row. He’d been profiled in the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune; he was so used to being interviewed on television that, in the end, it didn’t even make him nervous anymore.

The prints and reproductions of his most famous painting, The Dancing Vagabond, had made him wealthy and famous. He’d tried not to be seduced by the attention and accolades, but it got under his skin. He became used to it, then he felt he deserved it. He spent the money as quickly as he earned it. He bought a silver Jaguar and an apartment on Madison Avenue, dove gray cashmere sweaters, and fur-lined coats.

He was estranged from his parents and sister—there had been words between them that could never be taken back. He had no other close relatives, so he had formed a family of his friends and fellow artists. They’d had Thanksgivings in Aspen and Christmases in the Caribbean; they’d flown to Hawaii so often that Jonathan finally bought a house in Maui, right on the beach, one of three he owned at the height of his wealth and power.

All this, he had assumed, would continue forever. His old money would make new money; his holdings would increase, as would his friendships. His looks could always be augmented by a little nip and tuck.

But then in one fateful year, it all began to change.

Eventually, everything collapsed.

His friends sickened, then died one after another from a virus that no one was able to name or understand.

It seemed that as fast as Jonathan could paint his friends—those handsome young men with their sculpted cheeks and thick pale hair—they grew wan and ghostlike. They entered hospitals and never emerged again. Instead of parties, he went to funeral homes, ghastly places that smelled of lilies. He stood in the back and watched families from other places—Kentucky and Mississippi—approach their lost sons with wails that would break the hearts of the most hardened. These were the artistic boys who’d left home to become singers and actors. Now they were gone, and so was the life that Jonathan had thought would always last.

Then Jonathan himself was stricken with a degenerative disease that stole his eyesight within a matter of months. First he couldn’t read newspapers, then it was the menus at restaurants. Next, he found himself avoiding painting, not because he didn’t have ideas, but because he had difficulty making out his own lines. When his agent realized that he wasn’t able to produce anymore, all the attention stopped as word swept the art world.

He was blind! Worse than dead, in his opinion, especially for a visual artist. He was reduced to an invisible, handicapped status. Overnight, he became a lonely man in rented rooms who needed assistance with nearly every aspect of his life.

The bitterness that had begun flooding Jonathan during that dying season never retreated. Ever since, his mouth had felt full of acrid bile. Everything bothered him. Unsolicited phone calls, TV advertisements, how hard it was to open a bottle of pills. Some nights in bed he had to will himself to remember that he’d ever had another life, since there were so few witnesses to that time.

How had he ended up here, in this noisy third-rate building, populated with illegal aliens and drug lords? He thought of what his friends would say if they could see him now, reduced to paying deliverymen to bring cheap Chinese meals.

He could barely get himself to leave the apartment anymore, except to sit on the chair outside his door and smoke his little imported cigars—one of his few remaining pleasures.

His daily life had been reduced to bed, bathroom, chair, and daily cigar. What’s the point of living like this? he asked himself.

And what worried him most was that he no longer had an adequate answer.