From the Farthest Shore

Ursula K. LeGuin's third novel in the classic Earthsea trilogy holds these pearls, which I gather to me now.
"It is time to be done with power. To drop the old toys and go on. It is time that I went home. I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountains of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned."

"A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, "This land is as dead as the land of death itself!"
"Do not say that," the mage said sharply. He strode on a while and then went on, in a changed voice, "Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running... In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death..."
He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.
"I cannot say what I mean," Ged said unhappily.
But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"
"Aye, lad," said Ged, gently and with pain.
They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again."

thoughts from wildFire

A good performance makes me want things that I didn't know I wanted. Or more properly, a good performance reminds me of my desire to reach beyond myself into limitless possibility, there to become a conduit and to shine as incandescently as the soul I see before me, with gestures burning at the edges of memory and imagination, shining new light on some very old part of human understanding. Inspiration has wings born painfully from the destruction of my restrictive self, the critic that keeps me on the sidelines. I am rocked by sharp pangs that accompany the razor-bright illumination of my feathers unfurling. The crumbling of the inner life that once bound me now brings me both a sense of loss and a sense of release from the safety and limitations of my incubation. A good performance shatters the smooth eggshell calm of my unfulfilled potential.

Cool event happening nearby:

The Northeast Healer's Symposium is October 3rd, in Johnson, VT. Check it out!

Swedish Saffron Bread

After a lovely weekend class, I felt like making myself a treat. I've always wanted to use saffron in cooking, I wanted to know what it tastes and smells like, and I've heard the color is unparalleled. I spotted the spice when helping a friend clean out an entire kitchen. College is (was, alas!) full of freebies.
It felt wonderful to use and enjoy something so precious, and tell myself that I am worth a half-teaspoon of saffron. I can't wait to have this with poached eggs in the morning. Milk, eggs, a lot of butter and flour went into this recipe, but if I'm going to go all out, they look so good, and I couldn't substitute every single ingredient for something different that might be easier for me to eat. I mostly made this recipe to see if I could. Someone else can eat it.
The saffron turned a deep red when I soaked it (for 12 hours!), and it reminded me of the St. John'swort oil. Both plants are yellow but dye a deep clear red in extraction. In retrospect, maybe all that work with St. John'swort really turned things over for me. All about letting my light shine and directing my energy smoothly outwards. The recipe even called for 7 spiral shaped buns. So there we have it, my chakra healing class represented in food form.

Is this my lake? Is this the clear water of my reflective self? Tall water moving. Old water sleeping. The reservoir of being. When I picture a container, perhaps it should be a lake: spring-fed stream flowing in, river estuary flowing out, standing in the footprint of mountain ranges, mirroring my silver soul with the upside-down summits. What dreams are bourne across those waters, what secrets buried in their depths? The echoes of any sound I make can be heard from miles off, transmitted in a perfect crystalline whisper. I brook no interruptions in my musings but my mermaid mind merges with the waves of millfoil. Mine is a feathery, rolling sea, and if I were standing on a moor in England the heather tossing in the wind would remind me of it, as alfalfa and mugwort do, in the sighing fields of home. 'The tide! The tide!' young Keats would bellow, from the lookout of a pasture stile, and I would bound with him, pointing out the undersides of leaves visible on the nearest oak or maple, meaning that a storm is on the way.

the four letter words

Dear ____,
I just had a dream which is about to slip away. But I want to remember the sense: we do what we do, save the world or author it, shape it, become its architects, because of the strenght we get from being with other significant people. The architects of the world, the true Poets, its saviors, create spontaneously, without apparent effort, but always because they must, because some need, some impulsion drives them to great urgency. At this time their great precision, their carefully schooled behaviors and skills, allow them to flawlessly tap that which is the power of the universe, and use it in the service of Change (which should be a four letter word but isn't). Despite Fear, our strength.. no, BECAUSE of Fear, our strength lies in unity, not separation, unity centered on the perfect and abiding quality of LOVE. We are small in the measure we separate and close our hearts, and we are great in the measure we dare to let LOVE dream through us and imagine the blossoming of the future of the world. This is why the world needs LOVE above all else, and why the greatest force for altering current situations may still exist, dormant, among the masses. A friend told me evolution has not been survival of the fittest, all these years. In Darwin's later writings he theorized that LIFE was kinder than that. What would a world look like if we turned to the understanding, like he eventually did, that we evolve best through (or rather, in the direction of, towards) our experiences of Beauty, Truth, and LOVE, and through our integrity to those concepts and a deepening of the experience of humanity?
What might the world look like with calm LOVE at the wheel, instead of raw Fear pushing from behind, propelling us? Is that not a worthy goal?
If we stop to calculate everything in our Fear and our isolation, then what we miss is LIFE! And the vibrant, insane, jerry-rigged inventions of the dream will never come into being. But our science, our art is far greater than mean calculation, and as we talk to the universe, we shall become its next shapers, for ill, or indeed, for better.
***
All such power is metaphoric, and if I told you the contents of my dream, the horrors, the struggles in their particulars, it would mean nothing to you, less than nothing. Yet what I have read from such images may, I hope, be writ large upon mankind.

Being

This quote by Albert Einstein keeps following me.

"A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

Earthsea

I have reread Ursula K. LeGuin's fantasy masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea. Always a good decision. Especially if you have trouble with your shadow. Predictably, I find nature sorcery riveting.
"Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale, where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his thoughts aloud. He said not a word. His master smiled, and fell asleep in the rain."

"He stood in the innermost room of the House of the Wise, and it was open to the sky. Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight."

a glance at ecological restoration

excerpts from Bill Jordan's book The Sunflower Forest:
"Besides this, in attempting the paradoxical trick of reversing and reliving history in order to escape it, the restorationist creates a context in which to explore, experience, and perhaps even reconcile cyclic and progressive time. In fact, this double experience of time is implicit in the word "restore" itself. The "re-" suggests the cyclic and dynamic, while the "-store" indicates the stable, the stationary, and the unchanging. Combining the two--the circle for return and regeneration, and the line for progress and change-- generates the figure of the rising spiral or helix of evolution, each turn of which marks a return to the old and "original," but at a higher level of self-awareness."

"the idea that the goal of restoration is a "self-sustaining" ecosystem is so misguided--not only because the idea is ecologically untenable, but also because it is precisely the effort of sustaining the ecosystem against the pressure of novel influences that accounts for much of the value of restoration as a way of defining and making us aware of our relationship with it. "

"Properly and reflexively carried out, it generates nothing less than an ecological definition of who we are--that is, a definition of our species, or of a particular human community, expressed in terms of how it has influenced and interacted with other organism and with whole ecological systems over a particular period of time."

from my readings:

"It is not numerical singularity that guarantees uniqueness; rather eachness derives from the imaginal potential, the God, in the thing."

"We can respond from the heart, reawaken the heart. In the ancient world the organ of perception was the heart. The heart was immediately connected to things via the sense. The word for perception or sensation in Greek was aisthesis, which means at root a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, "aha," the "uh" of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. In ancient Greek physiology and in Biblical psychology the heart was the organ of sensation: it was also the place of imagination. The common sense (sensus comunis) was lodged in and around the heart and its role was to apprehend images. Sensing the world and imagining the world are not divided in the aesthetic response of the heart as in our later psychologies derived from Scholastics, Cartesians, and British empiricists. Their notions abetted the murder of the world's soul by cutting apart the heart's natural activity into sensing facts on one side and intuiting fantasies on the other, leaving us images without bodies and bodies without images, an immaterial subjective imagination severed from an extended world of dead objective facts. But the heart's way of perceiving is both a sensing and an imagining: to sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense. "
-James Hillman, Anima Mundi

the god of spectacles

Some gods sit behind you in the theater with a bag of popcorn.
Just a thought, but shouldn't there exist, somewhere beyond timespace, a deity who loves the theater? A deity to whom actors, dancers, musicians and mountebanks are devotees? A god, well, perhaps a goddess, who smiles at performance? A god who thrives in the moment when a human steps out of himself, becomes free from ego or limit, and creates that perfect doorway into the infinite? To such a splendid being, performance is the best sacrifice, and every time we show that part in ourselves before others, the god of spectacles is fed. I'm sure he? she? it has a better name.
The hunger of the human spirit for delight and magic in a dissolving experience means the god of spectacles will never die. Its shrines, movie theaters and opera halls and high school stages will not go unvisited, and its altars will always be filled at the Oscars.
This is the god listening in an empty theater, reverberating through the floorbeams, sighing in the air breathed by so many lungs gasping in wonder. It is a god of darkness and of listening, of behind-the-scenes improvisation. It is the god who demands that the show must go on, and gives its followers a swift kick off an impressive-looking cliff to teach them how to fly.
And once the dust settles on the floor, it is the god waiting for the next inspiration, the next intake of breath before a human begins what will become the next prayer to the god of spectacles.

another way to think about life

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pollan_gives_a_plant_s_eye_view.html

Mushrooms!

TED talks: know them, love them.
Saving the world? The little guys are already working on it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html

Biodynamic agriculture

An interesting perspective on owning farmland, and the money involved:
http://www.onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2565

The Shadow Council is being called!

Paul Hawken gives the best description of the shadow council I have yet heard. The agenda is simple, but with many variations: How do we save the world?

The Commencement Address by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3, 2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades. This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing. There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done. When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums. You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way. There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around
you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world. Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history. The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich. The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of
you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.” So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars
come out every night and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequeathed to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

……….………………………

Paul Hawken is a renowned entrepreneur, visionary environmental activist, and author of many books, most recently Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. He was presented with an honorary doctorate of humane letters by University president Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., in May, when he delivered this superb speech.
Our thanks especially to Erica Linson for her help making that moment possible.

i'm in need of healing.
here's to mending our spirits with art.
sweet dreams.

Creature memories

A lovely excerpt I found:

Tent tethered among jackpine and blue-
bells. Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north
And I can't remember who I'm supposed
to be.

I want to learn how to purr. Abandon
myself, have mistresses in maidenhair
fern, own no tomorrow nor yesterday:
a blank shimmering space forward and
back. I want to think with my belly.
I want to name all the stars animals
flowers birds rocks in order to forget
them, start over again. I want to
wear the seasons, harlequin, become
ancient and etched by weather. I
want to be snow pulse, ruminating
ungulate, pebble at the bottom of the
abyss, candle burning darkness rather
than flame. I want to peer at things
shameless, observe the unfastening,
that stripping of shape by dusk.
I want to sit in the meadow a rotten
stump pungent with slimemold, home
for pupae and grubs, concentric rings
collapsing into the passacaglia of
time. I want to crawl inside someone
and hibernate one entire night with
no clocks to wake me, thighs fragrant
loam. I want to melt. I want to swim
naked with an otter. I want to turn
insideout, exchange nuclei with the
Sun. Toward the mythic kingdom of
summer I want to make blind motion,
using my ribs as a raft, following
the spiders as they set sail on their
tasselled shining silk. Sometimes
even a single feather's enough
to fly. ----Robert MacLean in Earth Prayers from around the world

Gifts found today

"Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear"
"a Boy I loved the sun"
--William Wordsworth, Prelude Book 1

"While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight." Gaston Bachelard, The Alchemy of Imagination

The gallery of an inspired artist. Charismatic megafauna have their own dignity, and as he says, the inspiring romantic or mythic images resound deep in the emotional consciousness. This is not merely simpering wildlife presented for a WWF calendar, but a visionary on the boundary, at the crux of nature- culture interacting and speaking in our lives through his art.

of things which are small and quiet

Another review, I haven't read anything since the last one, I must confess that I've been renewing the same volume since May, disgusting but true. I just received this in the mail,
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
and as the title promised, it speaks to childhood memories of confusion and wordless reverie, I've only read the first chapter but it's telling me about emptiness and silence and the reasons for them, darkest patches of a child's soul buried underneath years of reflective habit.
Other than that, the writing style is startling, flooded with imgaes of nature, bright, lurid memories. And it is set in India, country of my dreams, maybe all dreams. She sees the biggest thing in the small things. And she understands why I start all my stories with "There was never anything that could be said to describe..." or "No one could tell..." or "Nothing ever happened to change..."

here are excerpts. They are long because they were so full. THIS IS NOT MY WRITING. It is Arundhati Roy's. And if it makes you read her book, then that's good, but if it gives you just a taste of what touched me at the bottom of the well, then that's something too, and you are closer to thinking you understand me.

"Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or the day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very little space in the world.
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. ...

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. ...
But when they made love [Larry] was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully....
What Larry McCaslin saw in Rachel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha's words had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies. ...
In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes.... Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago... in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much."

And I finished the chapter, and then I cried, and then I slept. And I'm still working on how this is true, and why it's been hidden so beautifully.

more pop music that's embarrassingly true, embarrassing because lyricists hit us over the head with our own malaise, or celebrate the surrender to shallowness of feeling. They say the things that it's not acceptable to express, saying the most (not)serious things about emotion that are taken seriously(not). or maybe it's the other way around...

"i don't love him, winter just wasn't my season..."
"Cause you can't jump the track
We're like cars on the cable
And life's like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button now
So cradle your head in your hands"
...
2am and i'm still awake writing a song
if I get it all down on paper it's no longer inside of me
threatening the life it belongs to
And i feel like i'm naked in front of the crowd
cause these words are my diary screaming out loud
and I know that you'll use them however you want to"