“I surround myself with trees in the hope I might become a  growing thing, too.”

These days my bones are shifting, trembled things. I am more earthquake than anything.

Love is a child with a gun in her hand.

I don’t know if you are the water or light. Only that you can flood a room.

You taught me to believe in love and then showed me exactly why I shouldn’t.

And again my mind runs to you in the way that rivers can’t help but return to the salt.

There are pieces of you in all the things you have loved. This is how we live forever.

I have never known what happiness really means, but I’m sure it sounds a lot like your name.

Everything I know of love is told in the bruises we left on each other.

I’m sorry for being this hard to love.

I know you will take the last of me and I will love you anyway.

I am a child of autumn: At home amongst things that only know of falling.

I knew I loved you before I understood what that meant.

All I really know is whatever the cost you’re worth it.

I spent a lifetime building shrine to things that can’t love me back. (music, poetry, you)

My body has always been a stranger. And it aches in a language I don’t understand.

And again I wake up hoping today is the day I don’t miss you.

Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them – certain traits, certain places where you don’t let the world go.

Believe in everything you do. Believe in your mistakes and grow from them.

Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.

For every drop of rain, a flower grows.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness.

Three very important points to keep growing. Great team effort.

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.