let the young woman into your heart—bell hooks

bells hooks calls her own memoir Bone Black a crazy quilt.  It's true, except for this—this book is far from crazy.  It's sixty-one chapters of pure prose poetry.

A passage for us all, stolen from the book's near end:

For the first time in my life I hear someone say that there is nothing wrong with feeling alone, that he, too, has been at the edge, has felt the fear of drowning, of being moved toward death without consciously contemplating suicide.  I do not ask him how he knows, how he feels with me this pain in my heart.  When the talk ends, when we are alone, he repeats again and again the words that are a net catching the body falling from a tall place.  When I weep and sob all over the slate gray clothing he tells me that the young woman standing on the cliff, alone and afraid to live, is only suspended in a moment of hesitation, that she will overcome her fear and leap into life—that she will bring with her the treasures that are her being: the beauty, the courage, the wisdom.  He tells me to let that young woman into my heart, to begin to love her so that she can live and live and go on living.