Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don’t mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.
I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.
There might not be a measure of happiness left in a life, but there could be beauty and grace and endless love.
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.
Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don’t you think? I mean if you enjoy it.
That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.
To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.
Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.
Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.
Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.
How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.
He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.
So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.
Life and death lived inside each other. That’s what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.
He’s a cocky SOB. He knew the Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab.
Surfing is a life path. You have to really commit… You have to let go and have faith that it’s gonna work out when you take off.
A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories – I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.