It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me.
It was all unknown to me then... everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true... It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.
When it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair. If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we’ve fallen before. I hope you will remember that the next time you fail.
I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.
As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn’t put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be.
He didn’t do anything. I’m the one. I broke my own heart.
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence.
She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again.
By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn’t begrudge my mother a thing. The truth was, in spite of all that, she’d been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot.
Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.
I mean: be your best, most gigantic self.
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose.
In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind.
Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
The thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.
Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.
One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.
Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.
Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with sitting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our life, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there.