You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

As a writer, I am not goddess of the universes I create. I am at most a stage manager of the plentiful gifts which tumble out of the horn of plenty, which is to say there is a source so sweet and forgiving and generous that I pray every day to let that source be my guide.

I never claimed to be a low-maintenance gal, but when I'm writing, it's particularly challenging. I lose things constantly: my watch, my glasses, my papers, my mind.

These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.

Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to. This is something that I've struggled with my whole life long.

At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.

I now know that things I always thought I could depend on can crash in an instant. Because of the love that I have been shown, I now know what it means to be 'beloved.' I now know that no breath is to be taken for granted.