I emailed my husband a poem, and he replied by sending me a to-do list.

I am a long drive through ugly country.

Sometimes, we need to give people more than they deserve.

Today, the sun rises over endless fields of what.

I’m having a strange day in which everything my left hand touches feels rough and everything my right hand touches feels smooth.

Sometimes I feel like a faint pencil line under all the wrong words.

I want so much for this day.

I sing sweet songs while I piddle around the house, just like my mother did. My husband studies the qualities of maple leaves scattered on a table, just like his father would.

Driven to abstraction.

I just saw a flock of birds flying in the shape of a giant bird.

Misread of the day: Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be itchy.

We don’t always know the whole story, and the whole story isn’t always ours to know.

My thoughts are like cicadas: They burrow underground for years before returning to the surface to scream from the trees.

My life is a ripe fruit with a bruise hidden deep inside.

Some days, I feel like a paramecium lodged inside my own brain.

I’ve gone from one monitor to two. Pretty soon, I’ll be surrounded by monitors—not exactly a ring of fire, but one of heat and light.

The product of consumption attempts to consume itself.

Hayden stood on my chest this morning until I agreed to get out of bed.

I just watched a video of a pet pig being massaged with a fork.

Every day, I make sure my dog knows the love she never knew before we met.

The world sounds like an endlessly compressing accordion

Apostrophetal: The assumption of the fetal position after being exposed to too many improperly used apostrophes.

The tenderness of spring reminds me how tender we all are.

I don’t really see the point. But I am open to the possibility of there being one.

One thousand thoughts between two that matter.

Microsoft Word just suggested I change “dysfunctionally” to “dysfunction ally.” That’s what I need: an ally with whom I can share my dysfunction.

A marriage between two people with ADHD can be summed up in three words: mutually assured distraction.

If we loved living beings more than we love war: biological welfare.

It took more than three years, but I finally found Hayden’s tickle spot.

I dreamed I went to work naked, which was very disturbing because I don’t have a job.

My life is like a prom dress: I don’t know if it works or if it’s a disaster.

My mind used to be sodden. Now it is a sieve.

Today’s activities feel as pointless as setting a corpse’s coif with hairspray.

I am listening to rain and birdsong.

No reality but in the mind.

The inspired create the pseudo-effect of inspiration in the uninspired.

Behind every malady a tragedy.

If too many people start to like what you are doing, you’d better do something else.

The most annoying thing about Buddhism is all the bowing.

Compassion takes over where understanding leaves off.

I am not a writer. I am a transcriptionist for my mental activity.

When cricket chirps are slowed down, they sound like a choir of angels. Don’t let anyone convince you the world isn’t miraculous.

There’s a kind of alone-togetherness that permeates existence.

The measure of intelligence is not the ability to think perfectly but the ability to rethink imperfect thoughts.

I can accept the sound of the neighbor’s Big Wheel obsessively mapping the driveway that lies right outside my writing studio. But I will never accept the incessant tinkling of his little tricycle bell.

The people who think they’ve seen God have really only seen into their own minds.

The desire to achieve Enlightenment is the desire to enter into a controlled psychotic state.

You can’t understand the minds of others until you understand what your own mind is capable of.

My word of the day is “salvage,” not to be confused with “selvage.” Or is it the other way around—something that should be discarded, not saved?

Sometimes I don’t feel like a human being. I feel like a cautionary tale.

Like any truly romantic couple, my dog and I often watch the sunrise together.

The inner dialogue is the outer dialogue, and the outer dialogue is the inner dialogue.

If the only power I have is to make someone’s day worse, I have no power at all.

The mountains know they are turning to silt.

Tonight my therapist said, “You must feel like you’re on a lonely journey.” My response was, “I am Buddhist. We are always on a lonely journey.”

I’ve inspired tens of people in my lifetime.

The more ridiculous language becomes, the more truth it contains.

Let us not be remembered by one word: ruin.

Tomorrow, I will kiss this ground and sing its praises. I will give it my tears and joy alike. I will thank it for sustaining life and for allowing me to come home.

Outside, children turn the last of the snow into snowballs.

Hayden just tried to eat the baby Jesus ornament that’s hanging on our Buddhist Christmas tree.

It can be hard to tell if something is done with intention or for attention.

I stopped reading poetry, and the world closed. Then I read a single poem, and the world opened again.

My mind is wind.

Change your language and you change everything.

We have no business in the sky, but there we are, imitating birds.

Reading poetry is less about the ability to read than the ability to see.

You can’t burn a bridge that was never there to begin with.

Sometimes, going back is moving forward.

Tonight in Sandpoint, Idaho, I saw a little girl with cancer toss a penny into a fountain. She stood by the fountain for a long time, lacing and unlacing her fingers as she prayed.

There is fire between us and where we want to go.

In Spokane, I feel like depleted soil.

There are birds with pretty songs and birds with ugly songs. I may have an ugly song, but it’s mine, and I am going to sing it.

I’ve been walking the alleys of Walla Walla. I want to see what secrets this town is hiding, given what it puts in plain sight.

In Hiroshima, not of Hiroshima. What I mean is, there weren’t victims of Hiroshima. There were victims in Hiroshima: victims of America in Hiroshima.

People appreciate a polite rejection more than a hesitant acceptance.

The love comes through the suffering, and neither belongs to us.

Jon is in the kitchen singing Zappa’s “The Dangerous Kitchen.”

Our atrocities live in the land, and the land speaks to us of those atrocities.

Sometimes consequence takes its own sweet time.

Living with awe is not the same thing as living in ignorance.

I love us in our frailty, in our confusion, in our stumbling, in our stupidity.

I love us when we try and fail, when we do something good despite our efforts to do otherwise, when I glimpse something inside each of us that is of worth.

I love the man who carries his nineteen-year-old German Shepherd into Lake Superior each night so the dog’s arthritic joints can be supported by the water.

I love the Army Reservist holding a sign roadside for hours that says “I support gays” because he felt compelled to speak out.

I love our calls to help one another and to support one another. I love our cries for solidarity, even if solidarity is impossible.

I love us. For a long time, I was lost from that truth. Now, that truth shapes and guides my life. I love us, despite what we can be, have been, and will be. I love us because of what we can be, have been, and will be.

The deep atrocities need to be ferreted out and addressed, no doubt. But that work must be couched in love, guided by love, and informed our deep love for one another, for all living beings, and for the world we share.

Without love, the tragedy is just a tragedy. Without love, we live in hate, are guided by hate and consumed by hate. Once we lose love and cultivate hate, we are made weak, not strong, and the wrongs we seek to right will never be righted.

When I stopped knowing how to love myself, I turned to us and learned from us. What we do—what we are capable of—breaks my heart every day. At the same time, our beauty and grace astound me.

I am learning to live in service to us, not in service to myself, just as I have learned to love us when I cannot love myself. I am here for us—as voice, as witness. I am bound to us—a slack, invisible rope all that tethers “me” to and separates “me” from “us.” And that is not just as it should be but as it is.