I remember an interview that Hozier did with The Irish Times:

“If I was to speak candidly about it, I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was death – a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way and you experience for the briefest moment – if you do believe somebody and you see for a moment yourself though their eyes – everything you believed about yourself is gone.”

This week I felt this truth. Meeting my niece has been the ultimate death of the ego, where time and space converge into her two brown wide eyes and goofy smile. She will likely forget these moments when she grows up, but for me, in these seconds of contact, my whole world collapses.

As Jane Hirshfield put it in The Weighing:

“So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.”