It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone.

The value of solitude — one of its values — is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultory conversation … may calm an inner storm. But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. ~May Sarton

sudden. incomplete. smitten.

inquiry for today~ for all of the fragmented voices and untended stirrings….

forgotten losses

While every love we know is unique and has its own history,

every chance to care traces back to the same enduring love

that lives below all names. The way

the branches on this towering oak

trace back to its enduring trunk. By loving you

thoroughly,I love everyone completely. By kissing

one thing, we kiss everything. Now I love

the fog that holds the flickering light.

It seems to say, “You don’t have to try so hard.” 

~Mark Nepo