exhausted, and yet rich in wisdom,

Of course, myths speak of the endings of things, of any number of ruptures and rebirths, and are often thoroughly drubbed with grief and the tragic. Ragnarok or Revelation is always at hand. Some beast is always slouching towards Bethlehem. Everything falls apart. The child crawls into the snow and is not seen. But over time a shoot will emerge from a heap of ashes. A girl will walk back from the forest speaking a language no one has ever heard.

Every time I have wrestled either an angel or a devil, I have been usefully but catastrophically defeated. But I have always had the distinct impression of being tuned, of something being burnt off, of giving libation to the god of limits.

Stories worth their salt don't tell us to get cranked up with either naive hope or vinegar-tinged despair. Stories tell us to keep attending to the grace. Keep an eye on the miraculous. It is not for us to blow the candle out; only the gods can do that.

...but the three strange angels no longer knock at your door, the sirens no longer wreck your ships as they are perfectly entitled to do.

And in middle age I can't remember if I am responding to the aloneness or creating it from necessity.

But still, I longed for relatedness. The back-and-forth of the thing. The affectionate affinities, the deathly hard-won totems.

The exiled requires union, the dark requires a mate,