At once I was expansive and extremely small: an ocean, an iota of ash, pulsing between omniscience and nonexistence.

Birth screams rupture time. They go forward and backward. I sent my scream forward. To my great-granddaughter. It has yet to reach her. But I know it will.

And the teaching was too big. Too painful. My heart was supposed to love all of it. Every moment. Momentous or insignificant. Every insect and particle of dust.

I remembered what it was to be a river stone. A hummingbird. A storm cloud. A leopard. A drop of rainwater.

It reminded me of a dreamer struggling to wake but finding he has gone in the opposite direction: dreaming himself into an even deeper sleep.

your temple is the ocean, it cannot wash away. If your temple is the mountain, it cannot burn. If your temple lives within you, you need not travel to find it.

beings made of blood and breath, so insubstantial we could scatter in the invisible breeze.

The understanding that I understood nothing. That my human life was not as important as the life of all the land, the seasons of weather creating and erasing rivers and fields and hills and mountains. There would be other kingdoms we would never live to see. The most important wisdom is the wisdom that is painful. The wisdom that almost destroys

No. I wanted a tree. A storm. A disaster. Someone huge and strong and rooted. Someone who was of the ground and the water and the sky.