You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.

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

I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.

You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

There is no place so AWAKE and ALIVE as the edge of becoming.

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.