Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 170

paths in the mist

"STAY ON TRAIL," the sign commands.
Or does it warn?
Or does it plead?



"Otherwise," it might add, "You will find yourself Elsewhere." Else, Elsewhere



A cold-iron road runs through this land...



but there are tunnels under it:



Here are pails of detritus from angelic rail repair:



And here are the footprints of a traveler who walks alongside, not on, the iron road:

from The Crossing

The turtle in search of immortality

On the beach my anxious mother lit the kerosene lamp and walked the whole length of the sands, lighting up the sea in search of the beiro that would take us to the island of Ataúro, visible hunched in the pitch-dark night like a giant turtle which, in search of immortality, had turned itself into land.

By days rather than hours

Our family solitude was soon broken by the arrival of an African cipaio, the descendant of former deportees from Mozambique, the famou...

unexpectedness

Heaven and other people's overscheduling means one job has disappeared, leaving me free to complete another job, but is that what I want to do? No! I want to keep on reading The Crossing, a memoir of life in East Timor, and this book of Aung San Suu Kyi's speeches that I've got.

Speaking of which, there's a very interesting interview she gave to New Delhi TV transcribed here, which I found fascinating. She is unwavering in her deflection of attempts at hagiography, a political pragmatist, and...

Hot and sour soup with foraged fungi

So, urbpan told me that the fungus I posted about a few entries back, the one he showed me (Exidia recisa), is good in hot and sour soup. I love hot and sour soup! So I went back out and gathered more of it...



...and then plumped it up in water, and then grabbed a hot-and-sour soup recipe off the Internet, only to discover that although I had the things to make the soup flavor (garlic, hot chiles, chicken stock, soy sauce, vinegar), I didn't have any of the other soup innards--bamboo shoots, l...

How you become trapped in amber

Here is how it happens. You are wandering along, and you see a golden portal, with swirling, beautiful designs . . .



You go closer to investigate, and it flows all around you. You're astonished; you can think of nothing but designs, and gold, red-gold, and honey. The door behind you closes, and your world is now only gold, red-gold, and honey, but your mind is so taken up with the design, you may not even notice. Meanwhile that gold, red-gold, and honey is penetrating you, filling tear ducts...

Aung San Suu Kyi's Freedom from Fear speech

At long last I saw The Lady, the film about Aung San Suu Kyi. We watched it as a family here at the wanderer's hut. All of us were completely absorbed, and afterwards we scattered to the four corners of the Internet to find out more about her. Providentially, wakanomori 's alumni magazine had two articles on her (more from that later), which led me eventually to her Freedom from Fear speech (1990).

I gather the first lines are rather well known:

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of l...

The urban pantheist!

The urban pantheist ( urbpan ) dropped by my place today. I love meeting up with LJ friends!

Here he is, with Charlie. (Charlie gives AMAZING kisses.)




We took a walk through the carnage and devastation that is the latest round of clearcutting for more new houses, and as we came back onto the road, he picked up a damp twig with some fungus growing on it.

Back at the house he told me it was Exidia recisa, which Wikipedia tells me is commonly called either willow brain (for the morbidly inclined) or...

The Matternet, or: How to use those evil drones for Good

NPR had a story the other day, "Five Nerds to Watch in 2013," and the idea of one of them, Andreas Raptopoulos, really grabbed me. He wants to build the Matternet :

"There [are] 1 billion people in the world today that do not have access to all-season roads," Raptopoulos explains. "So that means in the rainy season when roads are washed out there's 1 billion people in the world that are disconnected from all social and economic activity."

They are cut off from doctors and medicine. There is no m...

other worlds

On a zero-degree Fahrenheit day, the snow, in proximity to wet air, grows feathers. If you crouch down, it's like you're on the back of a great white bird.



Strange crystal islands fluff up out of the ice--an alien landscape.





In this world, blades of grass become arrows, fletched with frost . . .



and stems become slim, velveted trees.

Story: The October Witch

Here it is, the second of January. Outside my window, there's snow on the ground and promise of very chill temperatures. What better time for a Halloween ghost story? (Is there ever not a good time for a Halloween ghost story? Well okay, yes, there probably are bad times... shhh....)

This one is called "The October Witch," and it's in the Winter 2013 issue of Kaleidotrope.