It's probably cliche to say this, but in my experience, people are far more alike than they are dissimilar.
It seems very clear to me that we, in the West, cannot afford to continue assuming propriety over the world's resources in a careless, greedy way without paying for it - not only with the lives of our loved ones, but also with our souls.
I don't know if it's just my age or the climate or the high altitude or some of those old-cowboy values rubbing off on me, but I've grown slightly mellower living in Wyoming. I think if you ride into the West on a high horse, you pretty soon end up in a pile of manure.
There is a myth that writers get to choose their stories. You don't get to choose your story any more than you get to choose your children. You can make the decision to write, but beyond that, at the end of the day, it's going to come out how it's going to come out.
Oh, I don't keep a journal. How you remember an incident is dictated by your emotional state at the time. How you receive the information that is coming in is definitely based on your history and who you are.
For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.
It is the perpetual tragedy of all families: each of us believe our congenital pathologies and singular pains end with us.
There is no way to order chaos. It's the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it's the ultimate law of nature. There's no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.
In southern and central Africa, tragedy roared at us, and we roared back. We shared dramas publicly, bled them on the corridors of hospitals, laid our corpses on the beds of neighbors, held our sorrows up in full light. We were volume ten about our madness and disorder, even if we were also resilient and enduring and tough.
I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide - against those things, there is no conventional guard.
