We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is g… - Louise Erdrich

don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

Or maybe there was a god. Mine is the god of isolation, the god of the small voice, the god of the little spirit, of the earthworm and the friendly mouse, the hummingbird, the greenbottle fly and all things iridescent.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next.