In The Words of Others

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

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.