“When it’s gentle, you go sailing, have a picnic, take a swim.”

Death reminds us that we are part of the same river, the same flow from the same source, rushing towards the same destiny. Were you close? Yes, but we didn’t know it then.

The hot, moist smell of babies fresh from naps.

Discover that we are capable of solitary joy and having experienced it, know that we have touched the core of self.

Grief is like the wind. When it’s blowing hard, you adjust your sails and run before it. If it blows too hard, you stay in the harbor, close the hatches and don’t take calls.

From beginning to end this is a wet and blood smeared voyage, this begetting and birthing and moving away.

A red brick Presbyterian church… captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net.

Siblings may be ambivalent about their relationships in life, but in death the power of their bond strangles the surviving heart.

May the ability to see many points view keep us gentle.

Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.

It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.

Warriorship is so tender, without skin, without tissue, naked and raw. It is soft and gentle. You have renounced putting on a new suit of armor. You have renounced growing a thick, hard skin. You are willing to expose naked flesh, bone and marrow to the world.

In the garden of gentle sanity, May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.

Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

You cross me, I’m going to hurt you. But I’m really very gentle.

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.