Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

We are going to die, as is everyone we adore - I hate this! But the question is, how do we live as women and men in the face of this? Why do we let ourselves be so distracted and obsessed by meaningless B.S. in light of having one short, precious life? When are we going to wake up and be fully alive to each other and nature and magic and wonder and Life with a capital L? When will we stop hitting the snooze button? And then, how alive are we willing to be?