Chapters in this book

1. Front Matter i
2. Contents vii
3. [Outside the snapdragons, cords of light] 3
4. [Floating sheep turn to wonder] 4
5. [I pass through the mental hospital] 5
6. [To witness a selkie, owl-grandmother, grief] 6
7. [For each today, I’ll let my soul-force lead] 7
8. [Eternal waves quarrel at the bottom of a well full of blueness] 8
9. [Sweet jumping Jesus, bright flocks of rain!] 9
10. [Beneath dark purples, new life jockeying through the cracks] 10
11. [What brought us from the ocean into diamond Buddhafields?] 11
12. [Kombucha … skincare] 12
13. [Here’s the church, here’s the steeple] 13
14. [I walk past the mental hospital] 14
15. [Dappled eggs in space. Chickens scratch constellations into blues] 15
16. [Hello Tuesday, soul-power pancakes] 16
17. [The things we carry—what to do?] 17
18. [Pigs in space, bacon-colored, sprouting wings] 18
19. [Childhood’s sweet, rotten gospel] 19
20. [My whole house sweats blood] 20
21. [In the documentary on Aleppo] 21
22. [Grief flowers new dimensions] 22
23. [My neighbor reshingles his roof] 23
24. [What fool denies the inner life of a whale?] 24
25. [Masters from my spiritual tradition became so still] 25
26. [In last night’s dream, I collected my dead mother] 26
27. [At the Oldorf Hospice House of Mercy] 27
28. [I now intensely cultivate universal love] 28
29. [My heart continues to digest mother’s broken grammar] 29
30. [Into each pore, we ask the world in] 30
31. [“Every word,” wrote Beckett, “is like an unnecessary stain”] 31
32. [Animals … stars were never ours to hold] 32
33. [What would it mean, never to be brought into being?] 33
34. [Can we love life enough to anguish at its loss?] 34
35. [Our sky of sudden hail] 35
36. [Our White Helmets tranced by the blast] 36
37. [Our Declaration of Interdependence] 37
38. [In the multiverse, other versions of ourselves] 38
39. [… When I arrived at my mother’s deathbed] 39
40. [Seas … stars were never ours to hold dominion over] 40
41. [Myths, a script of gifts for the living] 41
42. [In every life, a moment or 2, for heaven’s sake] 42
43. [Among artists frozen into snowbanks] 43
44. [Yes. Hours brighten into months] 44
45. [Can you hear them?] 45
46. [We travel to our shipping address, like all things] 46
47. [We who boil in space] 47
48. [So we traveled hand in hand through time] 48
49. [We who open into prayer] 49
50. [Just as time erases kisses from my body] 50
51. [Everything’s just 1 insight] 51
52. [What if love is just spondees] 52
53. [We compassion] 53
54. [We command assertions of value] 54
55. [Confession] 55
56. [Mother, I’ve built a hospital] 56
57. [Raw honey sun] 57
58. [Said simply] 58
59. [Imagine meditations on meditation] 59
60. [Sprouted splinter fevers] 60
61. [Everything priests promised was eternal] 61
62. [I didn’t even get the chance to kiss you goodbye] 62
63. [I didn’t even get the chance to kiss you goodbye] 63
64. [Do you believe in magic?] 64
65. [“Suffering is part of the divine idea.”] 65
66. [Said simply] 66
67. [I drank the whole alphabet of grief. Then held a blood orange] 67
68. [Brothers, sisters, impossible to say] 68
69. [Dears. Beloveds] 69
70. [Closing Waves] 70
71. Notes 71
72. Acknowledgments 75