... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.