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Identity
Fitting In
Three beloved cats, one sand-painting ceremony, four pairs of blue-shag sandals
September 2004August 2004
If I pray for the light, I need to remember that light isn’t sentimental. It illuminates the smiling infant and the wormy corpse, every broken promise and every act of faith.
August 2004Finding George
Michael and I had a daughter, two years old, and I was pregnant with our second child. I was supposed to be happy, but I didn’t like my husband to touch me; in fact, I didn’t like my husband. I’d gone from the cage of my parents’ home to a cage of my own making. I could hardly breathe.
June 2004An Inquiry Into Living While Walking The Roads Of America, Mexico, And Beyond
There was a great longing and loneliness inside me. And as I delved into this loneliness, I asked, “Is there an ultimate freedom?” I would eventually walk some thirty-five hundred miles of back roads in the United States and Mexico. Having left behind everything I knew, I had nowhere to go, nothing to do but die into this question. I’d never really wished to be an explorer, yet this inquiry moved me to let go of all that was not entirely new and alive. So my walking journey began.
June 2004Tiny Bells
I am a dream. Once I was a man. Once I dreamed as you now dream, woke as you will awaken. I used to walk the world between earth and sky. Now I am a memory. If you awake to memories of a life you never lived, it is because you have let me enter your dreams.
April 2004Called To Be Apart
My mother believed in miracles. She believed that faith could move mountains, that there is a divine plan for the universe, that Jesus never fails. My mother believed that if she was the best little girl in the world, nothing bad would ever happen to her.
April 2004Red Eggs
I am eleven, not quite a little girl, not quite a young woman. There are things I know that I should not know, things of which I am not to speak, such as: I am not supposed to know that my father is a checkout clerk, not the grocery-store manager. I am not supposed to know the dolls I play with are stolen.
March 2004Sunbeams
March 2004[The philosopher] Wittgenstein writes about a man who, not being certain of an item he reads in the newspaper, buys one hundred copies of the paper to reassure himself of its truth.
Sunbeams
February 2004Man made the city, God made the country, but the devil made the small town.
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