Terry Tempest Williams

My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

—MARY OLIVER,
Dream Work

Perhaps, I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do not know, to create a path for myself with the idea that “memory is the only way home.”

I have been in retreat. This story is my return.

“The stride of an ibis was a measurement used in building the great temples of the Nile.”

She looked too beautiful to be sick.

We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us.

Each tragedy has its own territory.

At this moment, I realized how badly Mother wanted to live.

When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

How can we be so sad and so full at the same time?