We aren’t poor,” my mother said, again and again. “Because we’re rich in love.
She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
It’s wrong that this is required of you. It’s wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.
You’ve made it so long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.
There are stories you’ll learn if you’re strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.
When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.
Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
I’ve given you everything,” she insisted again and again in her last days. “Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.
I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done such things with men based on far less.
I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.
I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives – those.
Bagby Hot Springs.
Letting go of expectation when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.
I’d been a girl forever, after all, familiar with and reliant upon the powers my very girlness granted me.
And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.
I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward.
You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.