In the Wild Light

You’ll never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear. Fear tells you to make your life small. Fear tells you to think small. Fear tells you to be small-hearted. Fear seeks to preserve itself, and the bigger you let your life and perspective and heart get, the less air you give fear to survive.

You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous. Remember that.

This is what you remember of the people you love when they're gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.

Life often won't freely give you moments of joy. Sometimes you have to wrench them away and cup them in your hands to protect them from the wind and rain.

I told you that there are many things that poetry won't do. But there are many things poetry will do. Poetry makes arguments. It presents cases for better ways of living and seeing the world and those around us. It heals wounds. It opens our eyes to wonder and ugliness and beauty and brutality. Poetry can be the one light that lasts the night. The warmth that survives the winter. The harvest that survives the long drought. The love that survives death. The things poetry can do are far more important than the things it can't.

This world is knives and wolves but also swans and stars.

I lower the visor against the sinking sun. A ray catches a crack in the windshield and illuminates it, a tiny comet. I've always loved when the light finds the broken spots in the world and makes them beautiful.

You can feel when your mind’s building a palace for a memory. A place it lives, glowing and dancing in marble halls. A place you can visit when you need to feel less of the world’s gravity.

We think of language as this tame thing that lives in neat garden beds, bound by rules and fences. Then someone shows it to you growing wild and beautiful, flowering vines consuming cities, erasing pavement and lines. Breaking through any fence that would try to contain it. Reclaiming. Reshaping. Reforming. In my life, I've never known anything else that felt so full of infinite possibility. Words make me feel strong. They make me feel powerful and alive. They make me feel like I can open doors.

Life has given me little reason to feel large, but I see no need to make myself feel smaller.

There are secret fires you wall off because you fear what they'll burn if you loose them. Because you choose caution over possibility. But at the first crack in the wall, you feel their warmth and decide you'll gladly risk the burning.

I wonder if all my days will be spent pressing vainly against doors forever shut to me.

It's one of those tranquil days when the river reflects the brisk blue of the December sky and the pale winter sun, and the wind ripples the face of the water like brushstrokes on a painting. You look at it all and you hope maybe there'll come a day when no trouble seems very important anymore and this is all you see when your mind goes still.

Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.

You'll never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear. Fear tells you to make your life small. Fear tells you to think small. Fear tells you to be small-hearted. Fear seeks to preserve itself, and the bigger you let your life and perspective and heart get, the less air you give fear to survive.

I hear in my mind the swish of the boat cutting through the water, a whisper of a thing that returns to perfection the moment we leave it.

I wish our love was enough to keep whole the people we loved

Sometimes you get used to hurting, the way you acclimate to excessively cold or hot water, and then it’s the absence of it you notice.

Carry off my fear like it's sin. Fill my reservoir of courage. Cleanse me of doubt. Make me strong enough to cut myself a path through the world, like you. Remind me that there are things i love that can last. Goodbye.

Being a poet takes bravery. Yes, the courage to bleed on a page. But also to bleed for the world we write poetry about.

Not the same." She cries for a long time, and when she's done, she says quietly, "Someday, someone I try to save is going to let me.

While I sleep, he passes into the night of nights, drawing his final breath with no more ceremony than a leaf falling. My heart howls. I don't know how to live under the sun of a God whose harvest is everyone I love. I don't know.

The human eye can discern more shades of green than of any other color. My friend Delaney told me that. She said it's an adaption from when ancient humans lived in forests. Our eyes evolved that way as a survival mechanism to spot predators hiding in the vegetation.

This is what you remember of the people you love when they’re gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.

Ask me to number the breaths I wish for you. One more. Ask me a thousand times. The answer will always be one more.

I’ve always loved when the light finds the broken spots in the world and makes them beautiful.

He pauses once more, and with what remains of himself, says, "There was a last time I held you in my arms, and I didn't even know it.

I put the end of a candy cane in my mouth. "Mmmmmmm, hard toothpaste stick.

My life is better with her in it, even if it’s not how I’d wish.