Noel Benkman:  

rethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water, and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the World, and am free. --Wendell Berry The ways of destiny are sometimes very strange. Later, when I looked back on that time in my life, I could only come to the conclusion that most of us really never know what is actually happening when it happens. If we did, we’d either be saints or insufferable prigs. Being neither (we hope) we can only be thankful that our destinies, the paths of our lives, are, in the making, obscure to us. Whether our future is to be tragic or comic, rich or poor, the obscurity of Fate’s intentions is a kindness in any case. For that kindness we should be grateful. No matter what we live through, or how many hazards and dangers we have somehow passed, or how rough and imperfect, how torn and bedraggled, how seemingly irreparably wounded our lives might appear, it is futile for us to try to imagine how it would have been otherwise. If we look back objectively at our lives, no matter how messy and jagged and illogical it all has been, and despite all the mistakes, the further we get in time from the events, the more they line up in an orderly array to join a pattern of eternal fitness, and even, perhaps, at times, of heroic grandeur and poetical beauty. -- Tristan Jones".