I'd forgotten how much I love Annie Dillard

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...."'Seem like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."

--from  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

The Rapture

Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.

Simone Weil

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open 

my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar

like live maggots in amber, there are shells

of worms in the rock and moths flapping in my eyes. 

A wind from noplace rises. A sense of the real

exults me; the cords loose; I walk on my way.

Annie Dillard