After all, it's all kinds of things that make up a life, right? The big, like falling in love and spending time with your family, and the little....like blow drying your hair, applying concealer, and cursing those magazine inserts. It all counts. It has to.

If you try anything, if you try to lose weight, or to improve yourself, or to love, or to make the world a better place, you have already achieved something wonderful, before you even begin. Forget failure. If things don't work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again!

My mother has always been the point I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well. These months she'd been gone, I felt like I'd been floating, loose and boundaryless, but now that I knew where she was, I kept waiting for a kind of certainty to kick in. It didn't. Instead, I was more unsure than ever, stuck between this new life and the one I'd left behind.

You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends.

It was like discovering that some part of you wasn't yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn't claim.

Nothing like being scolded by a hippie.

Even if you couldn't see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked do hare, all alone to grow.