grief and praise make us alive.

Praise is not a goal, but the constant purpose of being alive. We praise by ritual, by walking, by grieving, by eating, by kissing the babies, by admiring the conniving bull snake

It’s needful for the peace of a people, peace of the human heart, peace of the earth, for grief to be there, not transcending on a bliss journey to avoid grief.

Nine tenths of feeling bad about life is the inability to see the details of the natural magnificence that should surround us at any moment. For that we need fresh “wild eyes.” Hope does not come from humans,

such a child must find a friend or secret master who recognizes their gift and allows it to develop in the hidden places of their upbringing, to survive a world where no one else has such awareness.

The reason, I think, most personal grief goes untended and left to other generations to mitigate is because people don’t trust the world they live in to hold them in those times, and let them be messy and unusual long enough for grief to happen.

We must remember that until our own heart develops, we are not yet ourselves but another treasured part of our mother: a precious organ that will slowly develop away from her

this mythologic time bath of origins remains a force that unconsciously nags us, just beyond the grasp of our memory. It is a source of constant dissatisfaction and unhappiness to the over-civilized who want to remember, but cannot, and seek satisfaction in lesser directions.

The unwillingness to grieve makes people search for someone upon which to project blame for the feeling of the loss they bear.