Some excerpts that move me…

The naturalist John Muir might as well have been talking about my family when he wrote, “Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” That was us: touching but separate.

I thought of my beloved Thoreau, who said, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

Death, like birth, was part of the package of life. She had come to peace with that. It was those of us who were left behind who struggled with it. In contemplating my late friend, I remembered something Mark Twain had said that I’d used in a letter to my father about Vicki’s last days: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence…”

…pantheism was a belief that God was in nature.

…Thomas Merton had said in a talk he gave: “The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

There are some things in life too powerful, too vivid, too life-altering to possibly leave them behind. They stay with you forever. They shape you from that moment on.

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” I could say the same for our quest, or for that matter,

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

Some excerpts that move me…

“The square got smaller again overnight.”

He always wants to know everything about school, but not like other adults, who only want to know if Noah is behaving.  Grandpa wants to know if the school is behaving.  It hardly ever is.   “Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we are big,” Noah tells him.  “What did you write?”  “I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first.”  “That’s a very good answer.”  “Isn’t it?  I would rather be old than a grown-up.  All grown-ups are angry, it’s just children and old people who laugh.”  “Did you write that?”  “Yes.”  “What did your teacher say?”  “She said I hadn’t understood the task.” “And what did you say?”  “I said she hadn’t understood my answer.”  “I love you,” Grandpa manages to say with closed eyes.

Not everyone knows that water and sunshine have scents, but they do, you just have to get far enough away from all the other smells to realize it.

[Minds]  One of them is getting bigger and one of them is getting smaller, the years allow them to meet in the middle.

“And we have to write essays all the time!  The teacher wanted us to write what we thought the meaning of life was once.”  “What did you write?”  “Company.”  Grandpa closes his eyes.  “That’s the best answer I’ve heard.”  “My teacher said I had to write a longer answer.”  “So what sis you do?”  “I wrote Company .  And ice cream.”  Grandpa spends a moment or two thinking that over.  Then he asks:  “What kind of ice cream?”  Noah smiles.  It’s nice to be understood.

…even the snow was happy that morning, falling soap-bubble light and landing on cold cheeks as though the flakes were gently trying to wake someone they loved.

“No, death is a slow drum.  It counts every beat.  We can’t haggle with it for more time.

“I miss the dawn.  The way it stamped its feet at the end of the water, increasingly frustrated and impatient, until there was no more holding back the sun.

‘NoahNoah, promise me something, one very last thing: once your good-bye is perfect, you have to leave me and not look back.  Live your life.  It’s an awful thing to miss someone who is still here.” [Alzheimer]

“…That’s why we get the chance to spoil our grandchildren, because by doing that we’re apologizing to our children.”

It’s never too late to ask [your child] about something [they] love.