I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship...

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to...

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn’t just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink. I...

There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don’t have...

What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life....

He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he’d become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes...

My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.How wild it was, to let it be.

It was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls enchanting the city

You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.

God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.

I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

Very nice,” said Rick after a while. “Very nice,” he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. “What is?” I asked, turning to him, though I knew. “Everything,” he said. And it was true.

But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.

The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to...

Grief doesn’t have a face.

I’d never had a mind for math. … It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a...

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.

It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes...

It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.

over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about suchthings have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some...

As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they...

Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness...

I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I’d surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn’t have imagined and wouldn’t have...

I have breathed my way through so many people I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn’t change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes I’ve...

You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. Anyone who expects you to has no sense of the arts.

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

Write like a motherfucker.

At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing...

It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow...

One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It’s like a mirror...

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she’d been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason...

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those fountains...

This is how you get unstuck. You reach.

But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting...

I can’t say when you’ll get love or how you’ll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it’s never too much to...

The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t...

This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and...

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six,...

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him again.

What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?