The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.

A friend of mine once told me that the grass is greener where you water it: I had forgotten to water the grass.

This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness—the guts, if you like—to face the fear.

I stopped asking for time, and thought about time well spent.

She was God’s gift to our family. I described how she’s buried on our farm, and when our family got together to try to think of what to put on her tombstone, we found this saying: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” I said to the judge, “Love is that candle. Love does not seek another death. Love brings life and healing and wholeness.

But we look away at our own peril. For what wonders await us when we don't turn away. Sometimes it is easier to try to make sense of the world one story at a time. And when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no "other," there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.

The number-one quality of all great storytellers is their willingness to be vulnerable, to tell on themselves in front of thousands. Each story told is a gift to the listeners.

I’m thinking about the fact that we imagine that we live in the light. We imagine we can foresee what’s gonna happen. We imagine we can control everything: I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do that. But the reality is, almost all of us are just stumbling along in the dark, searching, trying to reach some kind of home, while we’re juggling all these balls and hopefully on most days keeping them afloat.

what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us. Catherine Burns

All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” I said to the judge, “Love is that candle. Love does not seek another death. Love brings life and healing and wholeness.

Initially I was upset and repulsed by these rampant lies, but as I spent months with them in that locked compound, I began to understand their predicament, and I felt such empathy. They were so easy to love, but impossible to trust. They were sincere, but they lied.

But the next day I felt this kind of joy, like I was shining. I think I’ve heard them call it “the peace that passes understanding.” I had gotten to see that there was this completely random love in the universe. That it could be unconditional. And that some of it was for me.

It’s difficult for many. It’s unbearable to the few. But we have to see the world as it really is, and we have to stop thinking in terms of magic.

And so here I am seven years later. I’m a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of 7 billion. In any objective accounting of the universe, I’m practically nothing, and soon I’ll cease to be. But the certainty of my own demise, the certainty of my own death, somehow makes my life more meaningful, and I think that is as it should be. I find myself born into this universe. It’s a wonderful place. It’s a strange place. It’s also a scary and sometimes lonely place. And every day in my work, I try to discern through its noisy manifestation, its people, dogs, trees, mountains, stars—everything I love—I try to discern the eternal music of the spheres.

when we dare to face the unknown, we usually discover that we have more grit and tenacity than we thought. And we often land in a place that we couldn’t even have imagined when we started out.

She showed me beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter how much the chips may be stacked against you, there is a way to hold your head high.

I was thinking about this tree, which had been growing there for countless years, season in and season out. Every year producing its fruit, shedding its leaves, producing new leaves, and just carrying on its business in nature, oblivious of the big city around it. Oblivious of the hatred and the anger and the injustice and the wars, the depredation and the hunger and everything that goes on. Just simply being in nature. And I put my arms around that tree, and I wept.

The horror of North Korea is beyond famine and gulags. To survive there, real human beings have to not only believe in the lies of the Great Leader but also perpetuate them, which is a mental torture. It’s a world where all citizens are complicit in the deprivation of their own humanity.

No matter how horrible your day is, and no matter how scary your night is, everything can turn on a dime. When there's a knock on the door. And music, and joy, arrive. - Taylor Negron, California Gothic

I stopped praying to get better, and I thought about the thing that I’d want. If I could pray for one thing, it was to feel worthy of that love that I hadn’t felt for so long.

And you know, every time I’ve come to a major faulty conclusion in life, the man comes right after who will help me live it out.