April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seed: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time. . . Thanksgiving is Creation's birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality.

Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

I prefer to remain anomalous.