If You Want To Make God Laugh,

Her Purse Was A Weight, Ballast; It Tethered Her To The Earth As Her Mind Floated Away.

All Criticism Hurts Me. I'm So In The Wrong Business.

Hope Begins In The Dark, The Stubborn Hope That If You Just Show Up And Try To Do The Right Thing, The Dawn Will Come. You Wait And Watch And Work: You Don't Give Up.

Two Things Put Me In The Spirit To Give. One Is That I Have Come To Think Of Everyone With Whom I Come Into Contast As A Patient In The Emergency Room. I See A Lot Of Gaping Wounds And Dazed Expressions. Or, As Marianne Moore Put It, "the World's An Orphan's Home." And This Feels More True Than Almost Anything Else I Know. But So Many Of Us Can Be Soothed By Writing: Think Of How Many Times You Have Opened A Book, Read One Line, And Said, "yes!" And I Want To Give People That Feeling, Too, Of Connection, Communication.

I've Always Understood That Meditation Had To Be Part Of - Or Was Part Of The Natural Path And So I've Always Sort Of Dabbled In It.