Asakiyume mita

rachelmanija

And [the teens] started running, like the deer who lived in the forest, but the deer bending over Eucalyptus Lake looked at the teenagers out of the corners of their velvet eyes and wondered at the young folks looking a little like trees and shrubs moving so resolutely down the hill, going into the town the deer visited more and more to get away from the evil that the lake had warned them about. (p. 109)

From her window Meggie watched the dance of lighting on Inspiration Mountain.

A configuration of white sticks clashing.

Far off a rumble smothered in a smokeless smoky sky.

A white leap of lightning overhead. White hot to the eyes.

A long-legged acrobat strutted, hissing between the sky and earth.

How lighting danced.

The hide-and-seek show changed everything to shadow; lightning, jealous of the light, left the red-leafed trees looking like a negative on a photograph. (p. 110)

Meggie suspected that past the despairing eyes, down, down into the depths of this person was an inquiring soul searching for his own blue quality of light. (p. 63)

Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the fifth of nine children in a family of cotton pickers. In 1948 they moved to Tracy, California, to pick vegetables. She learned Spanish from Mexican migrant workers and earned a B.A. in Spanish from San Jose State University. She took night classes in education at Stanford University, while raising four children, and received the master's degree in 1967.

In truth, she only had one passion anymore: she collected smells. Aromas, perfumes, whiffs, and scents of all types. She numbered them and she put them in tiny special cases in her memory, in a classification system that nobody, apart from herself, was able to understand.

I had my cheek pressed against the windowpane. Just under my nose, fed by the steam that escaped from my mouth, the frost drew branching ice wisps, which imprisoned the dust. If I had had to specify the smell that lingered on the surface of the glass, I would have spoken of a dusty ice floe, of frozen goose down, of dark sherbet. Wait, I thought, maybe I could send that to Belle-Medusa, in order to check that the communication between us is well established.

I left my observation post. I groped my way to the bathroom and I filled the sink with what flowed from the faucet, water that carried with it cubes and needles of ice. Before immersing my face, I had to stir it with my hand so as not to use the end of my nose to break the film threatening to form ... I sank my head into it to my ears.

"It's me, Belle-Medusa," I said.

We can inhabit this planet, but we will have to do so otherwise. If we don’t take steps in this direction, it would be as if someone wanted to get to the highest peak of the Himalayas but wanted to take along their house, their fridge, their dog, their parrot, their bicycle. They’ll never arrive with heavy luggage like that. We will have to radically reconceive of ourselves to be here. And we yearn for this newness.

There are people who were fish, there are people who were trees before imagining themselves as human. We were all something else before becoming people.

osprey_archer

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it.

It's funny how the nature of an object--let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks--is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store ... I might feel grateful for the sheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting machine ... But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property ... But what if those very same socks ... were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if I don't like them. When it's her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return ... Wild strawberries fit the definition of gift, but grocery store berries do not.

“How are things going down there?” Cynthia asked him.

“I do not know,” he said.

“Which side is winning?” I asked him.

“I do not know that, either, for sure,” he said. “Probably not yours, though.”

“I don’t have a side,” I said.


Blue shot a curious look at Cynthia Benedictus. “How long have you known this fox?” he asked.

“I can’t say I know him at all,” she said. “I hired him about two months ago.”

“I like that word,” Blue said. “Month. I like counting time like you do.”

“What do you have there, mapmakers?” asked Walks Along Woman.

Loci held up the sheet. It was a likeness of Fondness. It was one of the most beautiful drawings I had ever seen.

“She does not interpret images the way you do,” Walks Along Woman said gently.

“We know this,” the twins said, speaking atop one another. Their manner was an echo of the gnomic pronouncements of the Membership.

“Then why did you show it to her?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Because we do not convey images the way you do,” said Loci.
Or Foci. Their scents were obscured by the mass of creatures around us.

I don't trust Matt's easy, expectant attitude. To live like he does is begging for disaster. It's disconnected from reality. But there is also a part of me that wants to see what he sees, that believes a life with him could make me, if not wholesome, then some other kind of whole.