My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.

It was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I

How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this.

They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.

Grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

And third, he makes me stronger, because you have to balance so much now—you have to reschedule everything you have to do—homework and him. It forces you to tap into more of you than you knew was there—parts that you didn't even know you had.

She did it because she was desperate, and so she listened to her heart. In my experience, there is a lot to be said for desperation—not exactly a bright side, but something expressed in words for which "God" could be considered an acronym: gifts of desperation.

In the rabbinical tradition, there is great insight in the notion that when we see suffering, we remember that this is only the sixth day. We're not done here. The good news is that God isn't, either. God is searching with us for a cure for cancer. God rejoiced at the cure for smallpox.

Above me, wind does it's best to blow leaves off the aspen tree a month too soon. No use wind. All you succeed in doing is making music; the noise of failure growing beautiful.

We can change. People say we can't, but we do when the the stakes or the pain is high enough.