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Sunbeams

If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes, are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair. Despair is for those who expect to live forever. I no longer do.

Erica Jong

February 2000

My lament is the same lament. My wife is sympathetic, but she’s heard it all before. Even the beautiful English language shakes her head when she sees me coming. Him again, she thinks, with his fifty synonyms for sadness.

Heaven And Earth

A few years after my arrival, I move with my husband to Koreatown, a colorful neighborhood where our jewel of an apartment gleams quietly amid a cacophonous welter of Salvadoran taco vendors, alley-cruising crack-heads, and ambulance sirens wailing the news that yet another Seoul-trained driver has merrily run a red light.

Her, Rising

Yes, there are the memories / like little phylacteries strapped to our minds, / and there are the ways we know our dead / have worked inside us

In A Broken World

Scott Russell Sanders On Resisting Despair

When I feel so much grief over the woundedness and brokenness of the world that I lose the power or the desire to go on, I turn to members of my family for consolation. Another thing that moves me out of a state of grief is beauty, in all its forms: in nature, in the face of someone you love, in music, in language, in scientific formulas, and in images of remote constellations beamed down from the Hubble space telescope. Beauty reminds me that all the grief, all the loss, all the sadness that is terribly meaningful to me, personally, is just a dust mote in the grand scheme of things. It’s tiny, ephemeral.

Talking To Trees

A doctor, so angry at the inconvenience of being called in to suture a suicidal prisoner’s wrists, said, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t do that again,” and sewed him up without anesthetic. That doctor was employed by the state to cut medical costs. He still is.

Body Bright

No matter how much we camouflage or medicate them, our bodies remain wild, bright sparks from the great encompassing wildness, perfectly made for savoring and exploring this sensuous planet; and that is a source of hope.

Sunbeams

The Middle Ages hangs over history’s belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size forty-eight shorts forever.

Tom Robbins

Sunbeams

Tell me what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

The Dead Boy At Your Window

In a distant land, a woman looked upon the unmoving form of her newborn baby and refused to see what the midwife saw.