Do your work, I tell myself. And after? Find a patch of lawn and sit down and hug your knees to your chest and let everything you’ve ever been told and everything you’ve ever seen mingle together in a show just for you, your own eye-popping pageant of existence, your own twelve-thousand-line epic poem. The tickle of the grass on your thighs, the sky moving over you, sunless or blue, echoes from a homily or a wedding toast or a letter your grandmother sent. Remember something good, a sunburn you liked the feeling of, a plate of homemade pasta. Do your work, Kelly. Then lean back. Rest from the striving to reduce.
~ Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say (January 9, 2018)
Photo: poppins-me
Live & Learn 
Ok.,putting this book in the queue
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Her voice, is your voice. Don’t want to oversell, but I can read her words, and see your lips moving. Hope you like it.
“This isn’t just a kid making a hero out of her dad. And me? I walked next to him in that festival light for almost fifty years and then, one night in February, his hand went still in mine and here I am, same as ever, except quicker to anger and thirteen pounds heavier. Shouldn’t loss change a person, for the better, forever? Maybe Will’s curious phrase – It’s like this – applies here, too. This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief: It’s like this. Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.”
~ Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say (Random House Publishing Group, January 9, 2018)
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I’m breathless, truly breathless as I nod ‘yes, yes, yes’, and in this brief paragraph, I identify and silent tears fall. Wow. Wow. Wow.
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I could share many but enough spoilers…
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Yum!
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He voice is so fresh. Funny, candid, poignant. And you’re right, DK, Mimi writes the same way! We are blessed to have our own Kelly right in our midst!
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Smiling. I am right! (This time)
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“rest from the striving to reduce.” perfect.
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Yes…right there.
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Love how her spirit shines through in her writing 💛
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It really does Val. It’s as if your best friend sits in confessional with you.
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Like Mimi, another book to add to my ever-growing list. Would that I could write in such a manner…
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Me too Dale, me too.
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And yet… you do…
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