The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.