The three looked at the king like, wait, what the heck are you saying, and then they were given seven days to deliver the very heck in question: a real container for awe.

Our ideas and definitions of awe are in many ways about an experience of something “greater” than humanness; something to be fearful of. I don’t know that I have experienced actual awe. I’m also not sure I believe that it is something to seek.

To feel joined in a collective that knows how personal and heartbreaking a cultural betrayal can be, and to share the feeling of being met where one is, at odds with surrendering, disappointed it isn’t another way.

Awe is a kind of surprise that resists pity or cynicism. It is not relative or subjective. It’s an active and dynamic process that cannot be separated from its twin concept, wonder.

I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.)

I cry a little, too, because it all feels so cliché. That I should look at my mother and realize she’ll die one day. That she should notice my tears becoming heavenly–sorry, heavy–and approach me, open-armed.

The pieces in this series find ways to speak into and around awe—often figured as speechlessness, to be dumbfounded—and how its overwhelming facts can run through our lives.

The evening you refused to sleep, we were over a hundred miles away from our home in Cleveland. A Rust Belt city to which—because of you—your mother and I will forever be tethered. 

Close listening, much like close reading, requires focused, sustained attention to how a story is told, not merely its plot. The work of healing, if not the biophysiological process of cure, is fundamentally narrative in practice.

There was one literary magazine that made you write “THE END” at the end of your story, to signify that when the writing was done, when there were no more pages or writing, it had ended to these idiots or robots.

What I needed was to connect the best way I really knew how: by talking about books, sharing feelings about a story with someone, and through those discussions learning how their mind works and in turn my own.

During the years I had cancer, I sometimes bristled at the language of “wellness” and its trappings. I didn’t need mindfulness; I needed oxaliplatin.