All Over Creation

You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're making choices. You've just been making bad ones, is all.

Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.

You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion.

But maybe that was the trick—to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation? A paradox for sure, but such a relief.

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.

Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year.

As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books.

When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too -- the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some people's faces lit up when they saw a child. His warm weight was like living ballast, thrumming with energy, giving her substance. Folks were drawn to that.

Standing in my mother's greenhouse that night, surrounded by mounds of wormy seeds and chaff, I feel the brittle coat around my heart crack open at the hopeless beauty and fragility and loss of all that is precious on earth. He was right, we are responsible. Intimately connected, we're liable for it all. I had to take responsibility for myself and for my kids, but also for Geek and Elliot, and for Charmey and Lloyd, too, and yet at the same time I realized I was powerless to forecast or control any of our outcomes. But maybe that was the trick--to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation? A paradox for sure, but such a relief.

When you’re caretaking someone who is sick or waiting to die, you get hung up in a morbid limbo, waiting for something to happen, to release you back into your life.

A paradox for sure, but such a relief.