How often do we do that, he wondered--look at someone and fail to see what's really there?

Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.

Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

Sometimes, in order to say yes to what matters most, I must say no to good things.

So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith.