That is why we need stories. If we have stories, then we can reexamine, reevaluate, find new gifts that we didn't see the first or the fifth or the four-thousandth time. If the story is worked, offered up, reworked, passed from hand to hand, it will become refined into the essence of the work each has done for the world.

One person alone never knows the gift of another, and certainly we never know our own. It takes a community, a community of the living and the dead over time to come to know what and who someone was, what their work was, what they did, who they became, what they offered.

If we decline to hold to the dead, we are rootless, always without the essential conduit that allows us to draw nourishment from the ground upon which we live. Without a living relationship to the dead, we hover near earth, without a taproot into her. We invent contraptions for nutrition, but ultimately, our disrespect for the ways of the world, which so deeply and crucially revolve around death, leave us starving and witless. Oh, so another library burnt down, ho hum, off to work we go. Will you even have a library to burn down?

What have you got to offer? You don't know, and you are not meant to know in a complete way, but endeavor to stay close to the sweet spot that someone loves. It is not something you can do with your mind, and it is not about figuring out