Thank you friend, for making me laugh and for singing my heart alive again and again. Thank you trees, for always being there for me, inspiring me with your strength and beauty and generous harboring of so much life. Thank you ocean, to you I return, a grizzled old bag, thoroughly used up. It was enough. Thank you, family. I'm glad I kept in touch and helped you forgive each other. Thank you, love. Our lives have become like two beautiful trees that gave space for sun yet also fed each other through the roots. Look at our beautiful child who lives on. Look at our friends who will keep you company when I'm gone. Find another lover and never stop making music. Thank you thank you thank you thank you...

Having stared down the long, slickening bannister imagining stepping into air, a new friend listened and shared his story which helped turn my pain towards the possibility of understanding. A reprieve from feeling separate, exiled, so terribly alone. The trees helped too. They’ve been here much longer than us. In our eyes and arms, branchings of veins and arteries like trees. Walking amidst great, beautiful trees who have survived right where they are without escape, yet with such grace and seasonally budding possibility, with such generosity. Trees and Mary Oliver, and a compassionate monk from Vietnam who all reminded me how to breathe.

Reading has taught me that there are opportunities for connection and salvation in unexpected places and through people who look and think differently. People who read may be more likely to talk with a stranger on the street, or at least to be curious about their rich inner life. Reading has taught me how to talk with strangers on the bus, train, plane, and down the street. Reading has taught me to be patient and that hidden treasure lies in noticing and in saying thanks.

A story that has stuck with me is Holes by Louis Sachar. There are plenty of others that have changed my life, inspired me to travel to New Hampshire to study brook trout (The Road by Cormac McCarthy, with its devastating last page) or to Madagascar to study ants in tall trees (Wild Trees by Richard Preston), but Holes just has a way of making me smile whenever I drink peach sauce, which is more often than you might expect.

Holes reminded me that onions and peaches can save someone’s life. It taught me that we can make reparations for past wrongs done by our ancestors and that in doing so, we dispel a curse and release blessings. It taught me that kids are capable of more than they might think, like digging a six by six by six foot hole every day in hard pack desert. It taught me that you might have to fail many many times, like Stanley Yelnats’ father, before you succeed. You might also have to take steps to right the wrongs of your ancestors before things work out right. Fortunately, sometimes you can do this even as a blundering imperfect person, without even fully knowing what you're doing, when you are courageous and kind. The book taught me that there have been and are ridiculous and horrible injustices, and that life isn’t fair, but that sometimes you get lucky breaks. Sploosh, the life saving peach sauce, being one of them.

I don’t even remember everything from the story because I read it so long ago. But it makes me smile often, and feel grateful for my life, including the lovely person in my life (my wife) who canned those peaches. From the outside, it just looks like brown sauce. But raise the sploosh to your lips, and you taste sunshine. Books and reading are the same way. Raise a tatty book to your eyes, and you laugh out loud with the pleasure of it, like a crazy person because no one else can see what you’re seeing, which is the world, differently, forever.