Society, like nature, is one body, really.

We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.

Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged.