I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.

We still and always want waking.

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.