The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

by Catherine Burns

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

when we dare to face the unknown, we usually discover that we have more grit and tenacity than we thought. And we often land in a place that we couldn’t

fear pervades everything: where you live, what you do for a living. You find the first solid thing, and you don’t risk going any further.

ISHMAEL BEAH, born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel.

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Suffer the little children to come unto me. That was this biblical phrase that kept going around in my head. Although, as the wardens and I kept assuring each other, the one good thing you could say about Andy’s death was that he didn’t suffer. He was killed instantly when an all-terrain vehicle driven by a neighbor rolled over on him.

You can trust a human being with grief.

“Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”