In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

There are days when your heart is so filled with this world’s beauty, it feels like holding too much of something in your hand. Days that taste like wild honey. This is one of them.

“Shitty life and ordinary life aren’t the only two choices.”

Fear tells you to make your life small.

Delaney explained why leaves change in autumn. I don’t remember the explanation, just the perfect feeling that my life, encircled as I was at that moment by beauty and people I loved, had become fuller than I’d ever hoped it could be.

Poetry lets us turn pain into fire by which to warm ourselves.

We think of language as this tame thing that lives in neat garden beds, bound by rules and fences. Then someone shows it to you growing wild and beautiful, flowering vines consuming cities, erasing pavement and lines. Breaking through any fence that would try to contain it. Reclaiming. Reshaping. Reforming.

My life is better with her in it, even if it’s not how I’d wish.

I wish our love was enough to keep whole the people we love.

This is what you remember of the people you love when they’re gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.

You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous.