Edward Fahey > Edward's Quotes

“Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers were explorers. They wanted us to be as well. They thought we should understand this physical world, but not get stuck here. For thousands of years we have shared their insights, over-analyzed and repeated their words; quoting and re-translating until all meaning has been lost. These great minds, great souls, great beings sought to be jumping off points, not merely the originators of emptied out and desiccated clichés. They wanted to be doorways, not doorstops.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“It was a dense, moldering night, smelling of damp old basements and times best left unstirred.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“Let go of the past.
Open to forever.
Hearts can heal.
Inside them is that which can never be broken.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“The emptiness of one’s days
can be seen as utterly hopeless
or as ripe with potential.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Some folks live lives that are complete and total shit. But that’s all they know, so it’s home for them. They can’t see things being any different, so don’t mess with what they got going. Pile it on; they can take it.
What they can’t see, because they don’t want to, is that things could get better; they could step out of it. It wouldn’t take much more than just seeing they can.
But that’s scary, ’cause it’s so unreliable. They can always count on shit coming at them; but is hope always gonna be there when they need it?”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Sometimes everything inside us must be torn apart. Only then can we sort through to what is truly worth keeping.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“You have become what you are through countless lives and lessons. There is something you can offer others; if only working on your self-discipline, fighting your own baser urges.
Do that then. Do what is offered. Learn and grow as you can.
That in itself is service.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“The diaphanous gown of the Milky Way shifted through scattered stars and all wishes made upon them. It gathered its silky folds as her eyes adjusted to darkness through spasms of beauty and joy.
Florescent mists wandered the shadows, brushing trees softly with moon glow.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Something had gone horribly wrong at my birth, so my father would never have his little soldier, Mom would never have her home filled with tiny scampering joy, and we each clutched our guilt very privately.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“Some guarded their children when they saw me, as though congenital defects and loneliness were contagious, even at a distance and through glass.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“Grief is a closing that leads to an opening just exactly when you really don’t want one.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“It is so hard to think ‘was’ about your mom.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“I’d gone out into the world, intricately lacing distractions and busywork around the long-gnawing emptiness, only to find I’d merely embellished rather than hidden it.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“I miss you so much in these wee morning hours,
when the depth of the night sets my spirit free.
When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the world
but the beauty I pull out of it.
I miss you throughout the day,
as I come across glories and wonders that could easily overwhelm me,
but just dull because you’re not here to enjoy them.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“Paulette had never been flush with self-confidence. People took that as humility, but humility isn’t painful and crippling. She hadn’t yet learned that humble and self-destructive aren’t the same thing at all. They’re not even on the same team. - From "The Gardens of Ailana" handbook for healers & mystics”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Forgiveness doesn’t make one person better, or the other guy smaller. Forgiving is just letting go. It’s turning back toward being what we really are.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“There comes a hush between darkness and day.
Like expectation of a caress.
A murmur of silence.
Tree crests peeked down at Paulette through slowly lifting fog. Bark felt around for its texture again. Morning gathered and drifted through mere hints; through vague hopeful nuances of ‘Just maybe’.
- From "The Gardens of Ailana" handbook for healers & mystics”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Life is about trying to find our ways back to our one shared soul. When we’re looking out at the stars, we’re looking into ourselves.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Sometimes I wish I could feel more pain
so I could touch that much more beauty.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“Broken hearts show us we’ve grown out of one stage, by ripping us wide open for the next.
We’re forced to choose what we do with all that pain: turn it against ourselves, aim it at someone else, or tap all that power and reach higher.”
― Edward Fahey, Entertaining Naked People

“The back of the church was raised up from the ground. Tossed in among its supports were what looked like moldering bones.
My heart ached so much for these poor souls, neglected even after death, I turned away to head back, but managed only a few burdened steps.
I drew up abruptly and froze.
An old, worn marker, standing off by itself, grabbed at my heart.
It was Edgar Alan Poe.
He fit in so perfectly there. Maybe I did, too. His sorrow and pain ate through me as I stood, head lowered. Can’t even death let us step away from our darkness?
It was like he was scratching a warning into the dirt with his finger, and meant it specifically for me. Don’t wait around for sermons to wash you clean, he seemed to say, for death or drugs to close your eyes. God won’t come roaring in with fresh troops to drive away the darkness we’ve walled our own souls up in. He didn’t put us there; we’ll have to dig ourselves out.
I looked at my own life as I stood there, feeling buried alive, like some of his characters.
But unlike his characters I had caught a flash of hope.”
― Edward Fahey, Entertaining Naked People

“Decades after little Colleen’s death, my sister Kathy still loves her daughter dearly. Colleen was born with cerebral palsy. She died in Kath’s arms in a rocking chair at the age of six. They were listening to a music box that looked very much like a smiling pink bunny.
The opening quote in this book, “I will love you forever, but I’ll only miss you for the rest of my life,” is from Kath’s nightly prayers to her child.
Colleen couldn’t really talk or walk very well, but loved untying my mother’s tennis shoes and then laughing. When Mom died decades later we sent her off in tennis shoes so Colleen would have something to untie in Heaven.
In the meantime, Dad had probably been taking really good care of her up there. He must have been aching to hug her for all of her six years on earth.
Mom’s spirit comes back to play with great grandchildren she’d never met or had a chance to love while she was still – I almost said “among the living.” In my family, though, the dead don’t always stay that way. You can be among the living without technically being alive. Mom comes back to play, but Dad shows up only in emergencies. They are both watching over their loved ones.
“The Mourning After” is dedicated to all those we have had the joy of loving before they’ve slipped away to the other side.
It then celebrates the joy of re-unions.”
― Edward Fahey, The Mourning After

“[Charlie is dying:]
After what seemed a long while, but hadn’t been, Marsh gave Paulette’s hand a warm and caring squeeze. “They’re here for him,” she said.
But their heavenly visitors didn’t take him right away. They had to make room for the chaos of modern medical urgencies. To get out of the way of well-trained professionals who had dedicated their lives to holding back Heaven.
Choppers are just as noisy and turbulent as we imagine them to be. One tore in over the hills and shattered every bit of peace Charlie otherwise could have lost himself into.
In an instant the Med-Evac team was all over him. In the midst of that blatant orchestrated chaos Paulette fought to find her peace, and to hold him inside it.
“Hang on, buddy,” techs kept telling him. “Don’t go leaving us now. You just hang in there.”
But they didn’t understand, Paulette thought. It was his time.
The chopper made a horrible racket carrying him off. Marsh, Paulette, and Ailana held their peace as its winds whipped their world into a froth.
Harve’s face twisted with something that might conceivably have been rage.
Then, all of a sudden, the birds sang, as though someone had given them a cue.
“So that’s what it’s like,” Marsha said, very softly.
“The afterlife.
“My God, it’s so beautiful.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Harvey wanted to dive into his ugliness; he intentionally reached for those long hours of soul desolation. He waited. He paced, ready to face down whatever was to come.
Paulette’s, though, busted loose uninvited, catching her completely off guard when she was already hurting, feeling crumbled, and vulnerable. When all she really wanted was some quiet gentle feelings for a change. A few flowers. Some sunshine. A way out of all that inner torment for even just a moment.
Had she had brought only nastiness out of her childhood? Hadn’t there been anything sweet she could remember instead?
As she wandered back to her cabin, searching for even a single fond memory, light faded everywhere around her.
Aw, c’mon, she thought. Everyone had some happy childhood memories. She had to have at least a couple.
How about the coloring? Children enjoy coloring; how about that? She’d spent hours and days on her art. It was as close as she could remember to having her Mamma stand over her with anything even remotely resembling approval. Her books and comics could be tales of Jesus, but coloring books had to be Old Testament because “No child’s impure hand could touch a crayon to the sweet beautiful face of our beloved Lord and savior Christ Jesus.”
So the little girl had scrunched down over Daniel in the lion’s den. Samson screaming in rage, pain, and terror as they blinded him with daggers and torches. The redder she made the flowing wounds of a man of God shot full of arrows, the richer the flames around those three men being burned in an iron box, the longer Mamma let her stay out of that closet.
- From “The Gardens of Ailana”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“Paulette awoke with an ache in her heart, a grinding in her gut. If there really was a God, why would He have let anyone put a child through that? …
She had survived, but at what cost? She was an itinerant professor, living in her head, not her heart. She had broken away, but abandoned her sister; hadn’t contacted her family in years.
Paulette wondered what she was looking for in these weekend workshops. Absolution wasn’t on the curriculum. What could she possibly hope to accomplish? To be a healer you need to connect with people. You need to touch, and let yourself be touched. And not just with your hands.
Watching these nurses, she envied them their friendships. Here were real buddies truly caring about each other, taking jabs, sharing private jokes and fears. She’d never had that. Even witnessing it from across a room, or a yard, only made her feel that much more lonely.
She got along with people well enough. Agreed with whatever they said, watched their pets, helped them move from one apartment to another. But no one really knew her.
Paulette had never been flush with self-confidence. People took that as humility, but humility isn’t painful and crippling. She hadn’t yet learned that humble and self-destructive aren’t the same thing at all. They’re not even on the same team.
And now here she was at a workshop for healers. Had she come here to heal; or to be healed?
It was one of those warm, charming days that write poems about themselves, and then settle these very softly into your mind. Paulette sensed what felt like a rain-laced breeze stirring her soul; sodden, and yet beautiful; laden with both the dismal, and the promising.
- From “The Gardens of Ailana”, a fiction largely based around adults still traumatized by having been abused as children, in the name of their parents’ religion.”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“In that moment Paulette stepped outside anything that had ever hurt her before. Harve needed her more than she needed herself.
But she had nothing to say. Nothing to offer him. She came up empty.
“I may not have shot any of those babies in safety seats, but I took out my share o’ guys in a country I started thinking we had no right bein’ in. I could tell myself they’d signed up for it, knowing they might not go home, but that just didn’t cut it after a while.” …
… “Oh, they were scumbags, alright. Other guys in my unit’d be ready to just level the kids too, cause they were getting in our way, but I said, Wait. Let me try goin’ in first. Let me come at ’em from the rear.
“Other times I just lost myself in the righteous glory of cluster bombing the hell outa those bastards.
“And for that one moment, in all the cheering and explosions it’s like all was right with the world. It was John Phillip Sousa at Disneyland.
“But then you wake up a little. You just snuffed out future generations. Maybe bad guys can have good kids if you let ’em. We’ll never know now.”
He was coming close to crying.
“And then you see all those pieces; kid parts lying everywhere.
“And their little faces.
“If they even still had faces.
“Once you finish throwing up, and then toss back a few at camp pub, your next job is to find something inside you that you can bury that under.
“And then … what? Just go on living?”
- From “The Gardens of Ailana”
― Edward Fahey, The Gardens of Ailana

“An awkward, irregular moon, like a squeezed-out teardrop, or something caught while falling, hung frozen in place over Paulette.
Trees whispered, though she saw none of them stirring. She felt her deeper heart calling....
... Her eyes ceded control, opening to those pulsing glows and darting spheres that had been greeting her recent nights in the woods. ... High noon was for those who could only see “stuff.” Night was for those of a more magical nature. For those who loved mystery. Beyond the world of dense physical forms is a realm that flows everywhere unbroken.
Whatever these lights were, they thrived in that world. One of the glowing forms drew closer now, almost as though taking a look at her. But then almost immediately it moved on again; going about its business, whatever that might have been.
Paulette thought of Mary. Perhaps the only person she had ever truly loved. Can the spirit of someone released too soon from life wander the forest? Is that what these were; were they spirits? Could Mary’s be wandering happy somewhere until her time came and her place in Heaven was ready for her?
If there even was a Heaven.
If there was a God who cared and understood; who let you in even after you had taken your own life.
“Oh God, if you exist,” Paulette prayed in passionate silence, “Please give sweet Mary a rest.”
One tree stirred, and one tree only.
- From "The Gardens of Ailana”
― Edward Fahey

“After finishing 1st draft of a novel, I have the characters, dialogue, scenes, and a plotline. I used to think this meant I knew where the story was going, and what the book was about.
I have learned over the years, this ain’t so.
As I work through its 2nd draft, characters start to nudge each other. The story itself takes its first soft and shallow breath, and one could imagine he hears a little bit of a heartbeat. Passions deepen, and emotional threads start to weave through what had earlier just been little more than a sequence of events.
On the 3rd run through, the characters stand tall. Some break free of my earlier concepts of what they were all about, what they wanted, how they related to each other, and where they were going.
From then on, THEY set the pace, and I do my best to honor them in becoming what THEY choose to be.
From then on, my friends; we have a story!

By the end of the 3rd draft, I have enough of an idea of where the characters are going, and how their passions empower the story, or tear it apart, that I can start cutting away, and cutting away, anything that isn’t that.
Until we reach the point where there is not a single word left anywhere in the book, that isn’t a vital, dynamic, organic contributor to the living whole.”
― Edward Fahey

“Joan told her, “Knock it off, Marsh; you don’t always have to be such a putz.”
Marsha, still leaning onto the sink, told them, “You guys and your always-must-make-nice crap.
“Mincing around with your damned fresh coffee, playing Little Miss Nicey-Poo alla time. The charming hostess with all her non-threatening jokes, never hurting anyone’s feelings. Sitting around trying to sort out the karmic implications of sneezing on the burglar who just shot your dog. Fuck it! Some things you just can’t Om away.”
Clarice’s smile had frozen in place, but her eyes belied her terror. She didn’t understand what was going on, but tried to calm the waters anyway. “You send out love; you get love back,” she said.
Marsha finally turned toward them all, and it wasn’t pretty. “Great. You can put that on a Hallmark card and feed it to the goats.” She turned toward Paulette.
Paulette said nothing. She didn’t dare look too deeply inside this rabid anti-Christian standing before her. She was horrified that she might find herself looking back.
- From “The Gardens of Ailana” handbook for healers & mystics”
― Edward Fahey