If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.

I mean it’s purposeful, even if we don’t realize it. The desire to put things in our path, to figure out how to finally leave the behind….

Each story, good and bad, short or long-from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness-they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.

They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.

Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

I grow green beans in my garden. The one thing I know about harvesting them is that you need to train your eyes to see the beans. At first it all looks like leaves, until you see one bean and then another and another. If you want clarity, too, you have to look hard. You have to look under things and look from different angles. You'll see what you need to when you do that. A hundred beans, suddenly.