:DD You're welcome. I love that poem so much. I want "we're everything brighter than even the sun" tattooed on me someplace.

Also, have you come across Gilead by Marilynne Robinson at all? It's a beautiful book, I think you'd like it. It's about an old priest coming to the end of his life, writing a book/letter/sermon to his young son. I'm not very religious at all, but reading it made me understand why people choose to be. Here, I shall quote you a bit:

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properlty. As I was walking up to the chruch this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial -- if you remember them -- and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting hte pavement so hard they'd fly pat my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the tings transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on inccruptibility, we will forget our fantastic conditoin of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant hte whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.