The Lion.

“The redwoods are on fire in California. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father’s arms. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. A glacier melts into the ocean and the sea climbs closer to the land. A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn’t picking up the phone. Your son’s teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. A country below the equator ends a twenty-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another. The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people’s lives. Your mother’s cancer has returned and doctors say there is nothing else they can do. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.”

“When you can tell your story and it doesn’t make you cry, that’s when you know you’ve healed.”

“Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.”

“To have someone understand your mind is a different kind of intimacy.”

Haiku

I never gave up on you even when you gave up on me.