top 3 excerpts from Life After God

the richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; i have always considered the rain to be healing - a blanket - the comfort of a friend. without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two in the horizon, i feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.

my mind then wandered. i thought of this: i thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments - we hear a word that sticks in our mind - or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly - we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the laggon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a dairy queen - or we have an episode like the one i had with the m&m cars back at the husky station.
and if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection - certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. we would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didnt even know was going on inside us. and maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real - this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. so just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.

there was this group of blind people, with white canes and everything - a C.N.I.B tour or something - and they heard us coming, and they motioned for us to stop, and we did. then they handed Mark a camera. they asked Mark to take their picture.
blind people?
exactly. but the strange thing was, they still believed in sight. in pictures. i'm thinking that's not a bad attitude.