Where there is a lack of other connections, of meaningful moments, in our lives, music can often full the gap.

Do you think yourself a string too short to save? Do you think that you are lank and straight, a linear bit with no connection fore or aft? Fear not your insignificance. Nature has a drawer for you. Yes, nature garners all the string too short to save, and mice visit that drawer. Here’s nesting material! Yes, you will be interwoven, be it now or later.

Reading, he claims, would broaden my experience of the world. The ideas to be found in serious books would deepen my thinking about every choice I make.

It was in her nature to love and to nurture; she would not leave those feelings within herself to fester and sour, but instead she chose someone who would receive her gifts gladly. She did not hold herself to be so special that only one special person could she find satisfactory.

He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small.

Time is something of an enemy” she opined, “for us mortals. And yet I love it” – she fluttered her fingers in the air – “I love this moment, and it’s a child of time.

I spiraled slowly down the steps, the soft way a milkweed seed sometimes twirls to earth. I wanted time for any vague thought to come to mind that mind should want. No new ones came, but the pace seemed a meditative winding, and what I was winding was like yarn on an oblong skein, softly enfolding a quiet center that was myself.

S IS THE SOUND of the sea. Her surge and suck, her spray and surf. Sometimes she seethes. She knows the sound of smooth. With her s, the sea marries the shore, and then there is scamper and slush in the sand. With curling s’s the sea rises to stroke the side of her superior, the sky, who loves and meets her in the s of spray, spawned in liquid and air.

Pardon me, dear human self, capable of the most heinous degradation, capable of soaring.

But I marry myself. I take my fate as within.