Learning to ride, falling down, getting back on
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You never grew tired of watching her work. You loved the hum of the machine, the sawdust that stuck to her sleeve, and how she bent her head over the wood like something swan. You knew she was sharing something intimate with you. You were witnessing prayer.
At dusk, everything blurs and softens. / From here out over the long valley, / the fields and hills pull up / the first slight sheets of evening, / as, over the next hour, / heavier, darker ones will follow.
Featuring Bill McKibben, Rebecca McClanahan, Derrick Jensen, and more.
I can’t see the virus, but I feel its seeds in me. I can’t see my faith, but I feel its seeds in me, too.
Hearing that old phrase “a good death,” / which I still don’t exactly understand, / I’ve decided I’ve already / had so many, I don’t need another.
There isn’t really a reset button for life — a switch you can hit, after you’ve gone through something terrible, that lets you go back to the beginning and start over. But there should be.
I bow to the pencil, the pencil maker, the tree that gave its wood, the graphite that fills its core, and the mind that conceived pencil. I bow to all the teeth and jaws that have chewed pencils out of boredom or nervousness.
If we could have been inside his heart, if we could have been offered transportation from our Jerusalem to his heaven, this is what we might have absorbed: Abkar was not leading us in prayer. He was talking to God while we happened to be behind him, squeezed in so tightly we could hardly find places for our foreheads on flawless plush carpet.