In those moments, I'd known that something new was being formed in me, too, created so gently that I hadn't even realized it until that evening by the shore.

Perhaps this rebirth from one thing to another happens repeatedly in a lifetime. Maybe life is a series of little deaths and rebirths, of passages and rites of passage, of God teaching you to stop clinging to one thing so you can reach for another.

no matter how many wrong choices we've made in the past, we can always decide to make the right ones today. The past need not determine one moment of the future. The

The past must be let go before the future can be grasped.

No matter how many wrong choices we've made in the past, we can always decide to make the right ones today. The past need not determine one moment of the future.

You can't fix the past. You can only change your way of reacting to it.

I cannot put words to the feelings within me on the day we brought her out for burial. It is an odd thing to stand so close to life's beginning and life's end. Birth and death are such strange cousins. We carried my mother to the graveyard, shed tears and sang hymns, then returned home, stood over the cradle, smiled, and sang lullabies. . . .

How wonderful the days when all was well. How necessary, also, that we must release them now. It is fine enough to glance at the past, but one must never focus there overlong. Don't you think?

A woman's past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We're always trying to persuade ourselves of things." I'm struck by the profoundness

A woman's past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean.

No doubt they will." May turns to me with purpose, stretches intimately close as if she plans to impart a secret. "A woman's past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We're always trying to persuade ourselves of things.

Perhaps this rebirth from one thing to another happens repeatedly in a lifetime. Maybe life is a series of little deaths and rebirths, of passages and rites of passage, of God teaching you to stop clinging to one thing so you can reach for another. A death grip doesn't reach very well.