Listen, are you breathing just a little,

and calling it a life?

Mary Oliver, Have you ever tried to enter the Long Black Branches

The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cézanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he’s alive
forever, this instant, and may be.

Wendell Berry, Sabbaths, 2001, VIII