Kindle Notes & Highlights
cursing when red turns to purple, praying to the god I pray to, which is no god, which is the vast smoky sky, for orange, then yellow. Let me be so bold as to pray for green.
Archimedes envisioned the threading of one material into another by way of a plane. To turn inward, to curl the hand, rather than to force. That this would make a tighter bond.
A screw is not force but convincing.
The coyotes don’t know this in language, but wilderness is threaded into their bones.
I want not to think about the expiration of the world.
I want to stand inside the fog socked in under a crown of redwoods. And then to become the fog.
I stop by the nursery to stand among the baby plants. It’s always wet and green under the canopy, everything in its little pot.
Someone had given us a fish hat, bit of whimsy, a chartreuse knit whose softness seemed right for someone so newly born, that jarring color and the fin swaying atop her head.
But earth is soil; the worms carry it.
the Dark Reprise.
Turns out the world is not the silence under a crown of redwoods, not mostly.
understory,
It’s not your fault you loved to run your hand along smooth floorboards as a child; it’s not your fault you took the sweet air for granted.
the fire-carved landscape, manzanita clawing its way between rocks, a dead trunk of a mountain pine clinging to its living twin, tiny pink succulents clustered at a rock seam.
When did everyone start to feel so far away?
We camped among the shornnative grasses, mowed flat to prevent wildfire, by the cold oceanand we didn’t know how the votes were being talliedand who would run the country and sign bills into law and how those lawswould treat our children’s small bodiesand our own.
The kids carried trowels; we parents dug and pierced orange flags into the dirt at the planting sites to mark our labor, the starts of new sprouts, this imagined shade for our children’s children. We stood over them, mothers over young, gods for our brief moment, remembering the engineer had said it’s reasonable to hope that a few might make it.
I thank him for giving me a wall to push against.
