A thousand days.  A minute.  A flash.  Just like life I think.  I hear her whisper: Take my hand and grow young with me; don't rush, don't sleep; be a beginner; weave pearls in your hair; grow potatoes; light the candles; keep the fire; dare to love someone; tell yourself the truth; stay inside the rapture.

"I've missed you since I was fourteen," he says.  "At least that's when I began to notice that I missed you.  Maybe it was even earlier.  Why did you wait so long to come to me?"

I try to remember life without him and it's like trying to remember an old film I thought I'd seen but perhaps never did.  I ask him if he's sorry we didn't find each other when we were young, and he says he would never have recognized me when he was young.  And besides, he was too old when he was young, he says.

Too often it is we who won't let life be simple.  Why must we squeeze it and bite it and slam it against what we've convinced ourselves are our great powers of reason?  We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment.  Let the inexplicable sit sacred.

When all your desires are distilled
You will cast just two votes:

To love more,
And be happy.

She had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

Trust your friendships.  Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet.  There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel; and not to fear what is strange, if you know it also to be true.  It is not an enviable position, being a bridge...

"Faith," crucially, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in consciousness and rededicated relationship to God.

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now?  Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...

And you?  To what end were we billions of oddballs born?

We live in all we seek.  The hidden shows up in too-plain sight.  It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious.  What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.