Things That Are: Essays (Paperback)

Staff Reviews

This is a beautiful little book of whimsical essays about the joys of being in a world as alive as you are. This book made me smile over and over again as I read it in the hammock in my backyard-the leaves singing, the flowers growing, the sun doing the thing that it does-and I felt, quite suddenly, how important it is to feel happy to be alive, even as it seems that the whole world is struggling. What a wonderful thing it is to be one of the things that are.

“There are some things you can do forever. Given a deep enough shaft, you can fall forever. You can forget forever, and disintegrate forever, and you can laugh for a very long time. But you cannot bleed for long—not you, not citruses, not twites or treepies, not orangequits or plushcaps or jewel-babblers, nor any creature whose vessels flutter with warm, swirling, cell-bearing plasma. Either your leak will mend or you will become void.

Only love can bleed forever; only love has endless blood. Only love's slender drooping tassels can bleed yet grow stronger, bleed yet grow brighter; redder, redder, never spent, never phantasmal-gray. Maybe, if it only gets kicked, then love is love-lies-dented, and in a few days it replumps. But when it suffers a terrible wound, love seems able neither to heal—to grow substitute tissue over its damage—nor to run dry.”