You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself, you tasted as many as you could."
Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Thinking of all those loved and lost in January, this year, and in all the years past.