It is hard to say when words will again flow without hesitancy, like odds and ends in a sudden stream I can snatch with delight. For my beloved sister  has left the land of the sentient, has entered another vista, far, far more incorruptible than this. I know such things, but it is as if she has gone missing and I do not know where she might have wandered, how to just be with her while being here. Not yet. How can one say, this is the measure of a life and it is shortened without our full compliance? The mind hears but the heart does not. It draws into quietude so resounding that nothing echoes. It is just human sorrow but it swallows me whole without a glance. This gaping ache pounds upon the center of me where the best parts have waxed and waned, where the wellspring that offers nourishment of love gives forth without end. I have no real questions. I know the present time has an answer and that answer is life, more life, here or there, this moment or another one, they are all a mysterious, elegant movement of the dance of being, our souls expanding to overlay others while still… we are asked to let go, each one. We are like fine lace shadows upon this landscape of changing light. We are the breath of the sky, the shifting wind offering power. I watch the branches of a tree shimmy and wave and want to take refuge there. Let me reach to heaven, too. Yes, yes, this life beyond life speaks to me. We live within that slender space between life and death. And endure the taking of so much. But this one earthly loss that cannot, will not be avoided: it undoes me today, it undoes me, leaves me flattened against a void where only God’s voice is known, where God alone hears all I cannot now speak without this thunder of weeping.