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.

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?

We choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is money. In Kenya, time is relationship

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear.

“You learn to be an open vessel and let life flow through you.”

I do not understand.

“It’s not that I am giving up,” she said, “I am just going with it.

What does pain prepare us for? Emily Dickinson says, “Pain prepares us for peace.”

Death is no longer what I imagined it to be. Death is earthy like birth, like sex, full of smells and sounds and bodily fluids.

I realize months afterward that my grief is much larger than I could ever have imagined. The headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the flooded desert, become extensions of my family. Grief dares us to love once more.