Employing spare, musical language and humor, and suffused with light, these vivid poems flash back to the speaker's past, as they practice empathy and compassion in the present - for self and others, across political aisles, and species. Learning to accept mortality in losing loved ones and chaplaining hospice patients, she increasingly appreciates what presence has to teach, in the woods of nature and relationships: everything we seek is already in us, in each shining moment we allow ourselves to focus wholly on everything present, the hologram of this, which is the universe, "this field of snow, where I sit alone/on a hilltop, until I think of nothing, / but light - light on snow, light/prisming ice, light on light, on light."