I’m reading Mary Rose O’Reilley’s book, The Barn at the End of the World.   

She writes of trying to make a recipe from an African cookbook.  When the pot is overflowing with 1/16 of the ingredients for the Ethiopian stew supposedly for four, she calls her son, an African enthusiast, and learns that a recipe for four is a recipe that feeds four families, or maybe four villages.  We each measure differently.

She shares how the poet Mark Doty in writing about the death of his partner from AIDS, “the process of decline gradually stripped Wally of all that was not Everything, and how in that millrace he became most himself.  Doty says that death is “the deepest moment in the world … even if that self empties into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents.”

I soften, carried on the tides, breathing connectedness, touching in and out.