(may love find you everywhere)

“Write about love, long evenings, the dawn, the trees, about the endless patience of the light.”

A better question is—how do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to insure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!

“All day today I’ve had the most gentle, quivering joy, because I’m beginning to heal. Consciously, happily, I feel that I am being born anew, that I am beginning once again to take possession of the light.”

I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it

The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

i work hard at managing, grateful 
and spare. i try to forgive all trespasses 
and give thanks for the desert. rejoice 
in being alive here in my simple world. 
each evening i walk for an hour, paying 
attention to real things. the plover 
sweeping at my face to get me away from its ground nest. an ant carrying the wing of a butterfly like a flag in the wind. 
a grasshopper eating a dead grasshopper. the antelope close up, just staring at me. back in the house, i lie down in the heat for a nap, realizing forgiveness is hard for the wounded. near the border, between this country and the next one.