A mood can be a mud puddle to be jumped over. - Jim Harrison

To have reverence for life
you must have reverence for death.
The dogs we love are not taken from us
but leave when summoned by the gods.

In fact he was as
lovesick as a high schooler of an especially sensitive sort who wonders if he dare share a poem with his
beloved or whether she will laugh at him. He does read her the poem and her feminine capacity for
romanticism for a moment approaches his own and they are suffused in a love trance, a state that so
ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be.

His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.

(from the novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name)