I grew up amongst biologists.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune but you could make up everything else about yourself as well. You move into a new town with a spurious pedigreed background and you just make yourself up.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

Where do the words go when we have said them?