Pain enlarges the heart, increasing its capacity to understand and care. Joy enters the heart, bathing it anew.

She looked out into the yard, and her emptiness was filled with recollection.

And in it she found a stillness and peace, a beauty that gently wrapped up the unraveled ends and lost questions and unresolved threads of life’s journey.In it, she found the entirety, the end, the beginning, and the moments in between, the essence of all she was and had ever been, and all the world was and had ever been.

For a moment, I was safe, wrapped in a blue-hued embrace.

But I did not see any of it.I saw color.And, in distant melodies, I remembered color.

They swept down into a great V, sentinels at watch withdrawing, gray swirls and curves of mountains reaching upwards in carefully-shaded lines of chalk and silhouette that overlooked the enormity of a sun-kissed world dreamt in glass-blown shapes.There was a deep, pervading serenity, quietand solitary, in this sanctuary of branch and water, drifting across in far-reaching swells, and I breathed it in—breathed it in as if it could purge any poison from my heart.