I felt someone should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one & say, we are sorry, but something strong & lasting had to do this for May, & you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts.

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

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.

To fashion an inner story of our pain carries us into the heart of it, which is where rebirth inevitably occurs.

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

People in general would rather die than forgive. It's THAT hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.