One day I sat down and began to write out the things that, to me, make life worth living. Sunsets. Laughter. Music. Love. Then others surfaced more slowly, the smell of something nostalgic, being seen and accepted, the chance to begin again tomorrow. Before I knew it, I had one hundred.
This book grew out of that list. Each item became a doorway. On the other side, I found a poem.
The hundred poems gathered here are about love and stillness, about beauty and growth, about the kindnesses that hold us together and the small wonders we so often walk past without noticing. They are not explanations. They are explorations: my attempt to hold still what passes too quickly, and to remind us that meaning lives not only in milestones, but in the smallest, sacred details of being alive.
My hope is that these pages stir something in you, too. That you remember a kindness long forgotten. That you notice something new the next time you pause to breathe. That you begin your own hundred, and find, as I did, that the list multiplies endlessly.
- Shane M. Dargan, author of The Weight of Quiet Things.