If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.

Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.

And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.

I felt a trembling along my skin, a treaveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.

A moment of grace. There rose up within me a profound sense of being loved. I felt "gathered together" and encircled by a Presence completely loving, as if I were enveloped by the music of a love song created just for me. It was not overwhelming or even emotional. Just a warm knowing that I was in God's loving embrace...centered and unified there. [Love]encounters cannot be analyzed, only shared. If you take a butterfly, Robert Frost said, and pin it down into a box, you no longer have a butterfly.

Rebirth is almost impossible without the darkness.....I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman -- precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility.