Recently, a friend recommended Willa Cather’s My Ántonia so I have been reading it. I’ve always avoided this book because it sounded too much like required high school reading. Now I understand why that is so, although I don’t know that I would have appreciated all this book had to offer had I read it earlier in life.

The other day I paused in my reading at a section that held particular resonance. Given how much I have been trying to focus on being present in my life, this paragraph was an unexpected gift.

In a nod to Iron Rider’s First Friday Writing for Randos (well worth checking out when you have a moment), I share this excerpt from My Ántonia.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.