Reading Alice Walker

1.  When I am thinking of Alice Walker, I am feeling closer to peace. 

2.  This hard, cold voice that tells me how much I am lacking begins at the core of me, and when it can't convince me there, moves to the outside and with greedy broom hands sweeps objects and ideas into the house that doesn't belong here as if they would make me whole again, and there is the first lie tucked under the door:  you aren't whole.

3.  There is an anemia of vocabulary, a holding back, a stinginess of shoulders hunched over, the shadow that keeps the heart from blooming.

4.  I began reading Alice Walker when I was 19, and at some point Mom gave me everything she'd written.   And I know this writer with a gardener's heart helps me locate where the ground meets the places we wander even when my feet seem too uncertain to step down.  She tells me how to plant this life for good and with complete acceptance and thanksgiving for what has grown and is growing.

5.  And though I don't know her, I still consider her a friend I've met.