How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.

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.

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.

Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.

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.

Journal became a sanctuary where I could pour out in honesty my pain and joy. It recorded my footsteps and helped me understand where I was standing, where I had been, and even where God pointed.

Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright