Stories are for people what water is for plants.
Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.
Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest.
We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others.
Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief. The water closes, seamless, around me. My foot with it’s blue-green veins is vulnerable beside this rock-hard world that wants to someday take me in. Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves.
I saw her future in my body and face, and her past was alive in me.
There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn’t for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.
What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth’s own elements to wound it.
As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I’ve seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans.
A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it.
She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper.
Our flesh has never been a boundary for the human being. We only reach out from there to occupy the space around us. Even more significantly, it occupies us.
He wakes up and he is not a halfhearted man and he can’t remember why he wakes this way, except that he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place. The.
Remembering, in Spanish, means to pass something through the heart again, and now all the years are going through his heart again as he tries to turn away from the ocean. But he hears it and he knows it is out there. Some sleepless nights he goes out. But this night in his sleep he says, “Oh, look at all those beautiful life rafts.
The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. Some say it is over, the A’atsika way. It isn’t, Ruth wanted to tell the world that she hangs by her strength. Alone. Don’t be fooled. This is just America happening to us again. She would like to keep them from ruining themselves altogether.
To be a hero you always have to betray something or someone.
Remembering place is significant, and that includes each visitor to a place, insect, plant, animal, or the passing shadow of a cloud in golden sunlight.
She didn’t forgive him, not then. Not really until years later when she realized how men were so influenced by their peers and governments. This was something Ruth, a woman who could stand alone in the world, would never understand.
When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable.
Now our bones are revealed like truth.