Sometimes -- she knows this from her own life -- to get to the other side, you must travel through grief. No detours are possible.

Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.

Above us our palace waits, the only one I've ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.

The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.

Tomorrow is another day. I've got plenty of things to worry about right now.

the darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars, those tine bright pores on the sky's skin. If only I could pass through them, I would end up on the other side, the right side, shadowless, perfectly illuminated, beyond the worries of this mundane world

I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable--but I always was so, only I never knew it!