In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.

He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.

It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.

Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?