the feminine journey is a story unfolding, and its epiphanies come through real things, through tangibles like walking sticks and dreams and deer antlers--all of which we might miss without taking time and space in Deep Being.

Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.' 'Good night,' I said, and rolled onto my side. 'There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life.

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

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.

One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what it is.

Grandmotherhood initiated me into a world of play, where all things became fresh, alive, and honest again through my grandchildren's eyes. Mostly, it retaught me love.