As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I’ve seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans.

She didn’t forgive him, not then. Not really until years later when she realized how men were so influenced by their peers and governments. This was something Ruth, a woman who could stand alone in the world, would never understand.

To be a hero you always have to betray something or someone.

The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. Some say it is over, the A’atsika way. It isn’t, Ruth wanted to tell the world that she hangs by her strength. Alone. Don’t be fooled. This is just America happening to us again. She would like to keep them from ruining themselves altogether.

She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper.

Now they were merely trying to fill themselves up but not with the heart, not the soul. They’d lost both those along the way...

Perhaps it was the word “God” that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon.

He wakes up and he is not a halfhearted man and he can’t remember why he wakes this way, except that he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place. The.

We are full of bread and gas, getting fat on the outside while inside we grow thin.

Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief. The water closes, seamless, around me. My foot with it’s blue-green veins is vulnerable beside this rock-hard world that wants to someday take me in. Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves.