7-1-18

You’ll be judged forever, for not knowing how to smile through your thoughts
For being just slightly weary
For being just slightly wary
For being exhausted.
You’ll be judged for being the sad girl, angry, or a little too tough
You’ll be judged for what others have done to you
when you can’t muster the ease or enthusiasm, but
No one will know how hard you fight
How hard you try
I don’t know, I mean she’s just so serious all the time…
You’ll sit behind barricades you didn’t build
Avoiding touch, invasion
For being just slightly unsure.
And then when you’re unsure, you’ll be judged
I mean she should have more confidence, she’s so pretty!
As if you hadn’t thought of that before.
You’ll be judged for having buried your softness so far beneath the surface
No one could ever destroy it again.
Yet your softness is the only thing that will save you,
You’ll spend years digging it out of the wreckage
Just to be judged, because
I just can’t explain it, she’s just too far gone…

[?]

The best people often arrive to hold a mirror to our greatest strengths and biggest weaknesses, to face ourselves… whether we use that reflection to spiral deeper or to wake up each day determined to try. Sometimes that mirror throws obstacles and cracks in the road. Sometimes trauma, pain, and fear. It can be overwhelming and uncomfortable. With compassion and patience… These people and this exchange are the definition of “love” as an energy, a state of being.

Pale Blue

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions.

The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.

Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years.

That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.
― Ann Druyan