"on laughing" patrick madden

• I have loved this kid since she was born -- since before she was born, when she was only an idea -- and yet I haven't known her until now. Her laughter has become a common ground for us, a mutual realization that the world is an interesting and silly place. (19)
• Man as the height of God's laughter: that might explain a lot. (19)
• Always a vowel sound introduced by an h, the sound closest to breathing, as if laughter were as basic as respiration. (20)
• Laughter heals; it can change the flavor of tears. (21)
• My daughter's laughter is so bright and clear and pure and unselfconscious that I suddenly understand why a cool mountain brook might be said to laugh. (21)

"do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?" mary oliver

• If this was lost, let us all be lost always. The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats; pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles. The sense of going towards the source. I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home. (25)

"every war has two losers" william stafford

• We know the seed will produce after its kind. Why then do we sow suspicion and hatred in some places? If we sow goodwill, honesty, reliability, industry, thrift, cheer, will these tend to produce those qualities in others around us? And the contrary is true too? (32)
• Nietzche saw that the life preservers the righteous clutched were made of lead.

"learning to love: notes on praying a river" john daniel

• Purpose is hard to identify, and probably always complex. it's said that birds sing to attract a mate and establish territory. They might; but they might have other purposes too, or none at all. I know the ouzel had an impromptu song to sing, a beautiful song, and he piped it with all he had. It sounded celebratory, it sounded noble. I don't presume that he was singing for me, but neither do I presume he wasn't. He was singing; I heard him. (45)
• The trouble I have with buddhism is that I resist the notion of detachment. Why would I want to detach myself from these verdant boulders, this flowing river, this mild rain? From my wife and friends, my work? What good could be greater than this? I'm with Robert Frost when he writes, "Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better." If it were given me, I would come back. If it were given me, I would never leave. (46)
• The feelings of my heart turn me toward the Spirit whose name I do not know. Whether it knows me I can't say, but at times I sense knowing all around me in this brimming silence. I sense it in the council of trees surrounding my meadow at dusk, in the swirl and slide of the green river. It's in the rank havens where bears even now are stirring toward wakefulness, in the flight of the owl and osprey, in the black-tailed deer and in the cougar that takes the deer down. It's the Spirit of beginnings and of endings, of necessity and of chance, of the one way and the many. Its name, though I do not know it, glitters in fire across the sky tonight, is spoken clearly by the whispering river, is as close as the ground I stand on and the breath that clouds and vanishes before my face. Death will loosen my grasp and darken my sight. All things are transient, from sow bugs to the stars. And only in their transience and our own, here, now, can we sometimes touch the eternal and taste its joy. (48)

"this soul has six wings: notes on ash and mystics and love and fire and taking it seriously", jessie van eerden

• A mystic is a kid finding kingdom in an ash heap. (52)

"the closest to love we ever get" heather king

• How can you be spiritual in L.A.?, someone from back East once asked and, as a car alarm blared, a leafblower blasted, and I looked out my window at the children hanging out the windows of the six-story apartment building across the street and screaming, I thought, how can you deal with this ceaselessly pulsing aorta of life with anything but spirituality? (76)
• Or maybe it's not that I'm seeing one group of things instead of another, but for one fleeting moment, all simultaneously: the opposites held in balance a paradigm for the terrible tension and ambiguity of the human condition; the dreadful reality that we can never quite be sure which things we have done and which things we have failed to do, the difference between how we long for the world to be and how it must be a kind of crucifixion in the darkest, most excruciated depths of which we discover -- the rear windows of the parked cars I'm walking by now covered with jacaranda blossoms -- it's not that there's not enough beauty; it's that there's so much it can hardly be borne.(77)
• Monday morning, putting out the garbage as the sky turns pink above the salmon stucco façades, I bend my face to the gardenia in the courtyard, knowing that every shabby corner, every bird and flower and blad of grass, every honking horn and piece of graffiti, every pain and contradiction, deserves a song of praise. (77)
• Maybe that's exactly as it should be. Maybe I need their noise and they need my silence; maybe the song we make together -- all of us -- is the closest to love we'll ever get. (77)