The questions are slippery – they fall, break, scatter, send out splinters. If we're post­religious, secular, rational and scientific, why aren't we more prepared to change the way we think? In deposing the deities from the topmost branches of the Tree of Life, have we simply upgraded ourselves to their vacant seat­on­high? If we're the gods now, shouldn't we be better than we are?

Darkness. Just for this moment, the house with its thick stone walls feels protected against the weather but in the end nothing keeps it out, not the changes of the physical world, the effects of time, seasons, years. none of us is different. Together, we cling in whichever way we can to the surface of the earth.

Excerpted from Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson. Copyright © 2022 by Esther Woolfson. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.