The first snowdrops pushing their heads up in my garden, emerging in the space of the few hours I'd been away. The evenings are growing lighter, the days lengthening steadily. Even amid despair, there is hope.

Mountain panic appears to be an experience of the numinous, what Rudolf Otto calls ‘the terrible and fascinating mystery,’which he saw as the origin of all religion.

“He met me somewhere on a dark beach and told me the secrets of the land of the dead before he was called away…”

“Because the heavy fist of terror was always there in your pocket even when you smiled. Because you went forth to battle beneath the shameful flag of compromise and played The Battle Hymn of the Republic but never John Brown’s Body.”

“New oaks poke out below us in the street, where water runs around the lopped-off feet of some historic general whose head the children painted red.”

You don't have to believe them when they tell you that your uniqueness is a sickness, that to defy them will mean your undoing, that it makes you the enemy.

I will shake my hips and the ground will quake. I will open my wings and the wind will come.

We’re done with ruling and with those who rule, with what they built and all their useless tools.

“We must survive the night - and all the other nights. We must survive the flood. We must not just survive but thrive in mud.”

“she danced the circle to call forth the spirits”

“Our cities, once bright jewels on the plain, are swept away in shards of shattered glass and buckled girder. In the rending shriek I hear the one-eyed king of giants speak.”

“Caught in the act of giving birth to a new oil-paint earth of no set design, you will lie there dying.”

“All signs announce, the change has come. I will be something other than I started from.”