Afterlife

by Julia Alvarez

What is the right thing to do? The certainty is not there. What lies beyond the narrow path, the nibble, the sip, where the dragons be? Just because she doesn’t yet know doesn’t mean she should close down and settle for the joyless default. The earth doesn’t need one more resentful, depressed sort. Having studied and taught stories and poems all her own life, it’s now in her DNA, to want to give that life a shapely form, fill in the blank in the dangling line: And Finished knowing—then—

Emily Dickinson. I felt a funeral, in my brain

A pyrrhic victory, Antonia had explained to her students, is one that exacts such a heavy toll that winning looks an awful lot like losing.

Bless the spirit that makes these leaps, Antonia quotes Rilke, sounding just like that widow therapist in the podcast, for truly we live in what we imagine.

Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born—so

Matthew arnold

Consider kintsugi, the mild-mannered, soft-voiced Asian man begins the last workshop in the Zen series.