We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that … - Rachel Naomi Remen

The silence in the giant redwood forest near my house draws me...At eight in the morning, the great trees stand rooted in a silence so absolute that one's inmost self comes to rest. An aged silence. Some mornings I sleep through two alarms and awaken only after the first buses have arrived. I go anyway. There are hundreds of people in the woods before me. People speaking French, German, Spanish; people marveling to each other and calling to their children in Japanese, Swedish, Russian, and some languages I do not know. And children shrieking in the universal language of childhood. But the silence is always there, unchanged. It is as impervious to these passing sounds as the trees themselves.

My father was the son of immigrants. He had worked since childhood and held two jobs most of his adult life. In the evenings, he would often fall asleep in his chair, his feet in a basin of warm water, too exhausted to talk. Always he had worked for other people, on their terms, for their goals...All throughout my childhood, there was a game my father and I would play. He would talk about his house, the house he would someday own...I was almost twenty when he and Mom bought a little place on Long Island and he retired. For a while, his dream seemed complete.

'Are you enjoying yourselves?' I asked [when I'd visit]. 'Well,' Mom said, 'your father is afraid that someone will break in and take away everything we've worked for. He's still working because he wants to put in an alarm system.' My heart sank. I asked how much it would cost. My mother evaded me and said they would have it in just a little while. Months later, my father continued to look weary. Concerned, I asked when they would be taking their vacation. My father shook his head. 'Not this year — we can't leave the house empty.' I suggested a house sitter. My father was horrified. 'Oh no,' he told me. 'You know how people are. Even your friends never take care of your things the way they would take care of their own.' They never took another vacation.

In the end, my parents rarely left the house together, not even to go to the movies. There could be a fire or some other sort of vague and unnamed disaster. And my father worked odd jobs until he died. The house turned out to have far greater control over him than any of his former employers ever had.

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

"I recall vividly the night before one of my own early surgeries, an eight-hour affair that would alter my body permanently. I was twenty-seven and unmarried at the time. Late in the evening a pleasant elderly woman, a technical aide, had come to my hospital room to shave my abdomen in preparation for the procedure. As she went about this humble task with great skill, she had asked me about the next day's surgery. Filled with resentment, self-pity, and a sense of victimhood, I told her what was planned and burst into tears. She had seemed quite surprised. "How would YOU feel if they were going to do this to YOU tomorrow?" I asked her angrily. she had taken my question literally and had thought it over. Then, patting me gently, she had said, "If I needed it to live, I would be glad for the help." Her answer had changed everything."