The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.

There are things you can’t reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open.

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.