What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?

Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Then why did you tell me?

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.