From Sand and Ash

by Amy Harmon

My father told me once that we are on earth to learn. God wants us to receive everything that life was meant to teach. Then we take what we’ve learned, and it becomes our offering to God and to mankind. But we have to live in order to learn. And sometimes we have to fight in order to live.

Loving someone and then losing them would be much worse than not having them at all.

“What’s a mitzvah?” “Something—a holy act or tradition—that elevates the mundane to the divine.”

A rejected infant will often die, even if its basic needs are met. A rejected child will spend his whole life trying to please everyone else, and never please himself. A rejected woman will often cheat, just to feel desirable. A rejected man will rarely try again, no matter how lonely he is. A rejected people will convince themselves they deserve it, if only to make sense of a senseless world.

Life is like a long note; it persists without variance, without wavering. There is no cessation in sound or pause in tempo. It continues on, and we must master it or it will master us.

Life is hell shot with just enough heaven to make the pains of hope all the sharper.

Sand and ash. The ingredients of glass. Such beauty created from nothing.

From sand and ash, rebirth. From sand and ash, new life.

Fear is strange. It settles on chests and seeps through skin, through layers of tissue, muscle, and bone, and collects in a soul-size black hole, sucking the joy out of life, the pleasure, the beauty. But not the hope. Somehow, the hope is the only thing resistant to the fear, and it is that hope that makes the next breath possible, the next step, the next tiny act of rebellion, even if that rebellion is simply staying alive.

Our immortality comes through our children and their children. Through our roots and our branches. The family is immortality.

You might not have children who will carry your names, but you will have branches and roots who will honor your names.”