Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

I hope to see everything in this world before I die.

believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed. As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in the world that can hold, in a mix of power and sweetness: words, song, gesture,

MORNINGS AT BLACKWATER For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will

So it is if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams all the way to the grave.

How would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

under the blue sky that loves us all.

THE ORCHARD I have dreamed of accomplishment. I have fed ambition. I have traded nights of sleep for a length of work. Lo, and I have discovered how soft bloom turns to green fruit which turns to sweet fruit. Lo, and I have discovered all winds blow cold at last, and the leaves, so pretty, so many, vanish in the great, black packet of time, in the

Do you have a question that can’t be answered? Do the stars frighten you by their heaviness and their endless number? Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand?