“ … ”

Early morning fog sneaking in, laying low, close to the rocky shore, hardly a ripple to be seen, not a seagull in sight; perhaps they slept in, or breakfast at a new sandbar…..oh, a mosquito at the window, on a Jupiter day.

wanderer

Learn to be small and swim through obstacles like a minnow without grudges or memory.

alison luterman

Harry lived with an ordinary-looking smart brown dog, named Edith. As happens when one person lives with one dog, the dog became psychic. By the time Harry stopped the car, Edith knew Harry had picked someone up on the road. She waited silently, alert in the driveway. Came close when Harry stopped the car and stood by him as he leaned into the back of the car. He pulled out the other human, staggered a bit as he drew her into his arms, righted himself, and began to walk. Because of the way Harry held the woman, Edith was prepared to guard her. She put her nose to the woman’s leg. The woman had slept in the clothing of a man who cooked with grease, she had slept in snow and wild mint, near the carcass of a skunk, had recently been in town and before that out on the water. There was no harm in her, but she was confused, in despair and might choose to sleep forever. Edith accepted all that. When Harry brought the woman in the house, Edith followed. She stood at attention, her ears flared forward, as he laid her on the sofa that Edith herself often claimed after Harry slept. It was a long soft sofa and the woman was short. Edith didn’t mind sharing.

Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

When he was thus engaged, he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine view that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.

w g sebald

Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents’ window long ago.

ray bradbury

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind, hospitals of the soul, theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff’. A mall–the shops–are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.

caitlin moran

I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer. To me they kept the world from spinning out of control just by being a civilization on the roof of the world in that continuous state of prayer. The prayers are etched on wheels, they feel them with their hands like braille and turn them. It’s spinning prayer like cloth. That was my perception as a young person. I didn’t quite understand the whole thing but I felt protected. We grew up at a time when nuclear war seemed imminent with air raid drills and lying on the floor under your school desk. To counterbalance that destruction was this civilization of monks living high in the Himalayas who were continuously praying for us, for the planet and for all of nature. That made me feel safe.

patti smith

Big Sur is one of the wildest, most spectacular coasts in the world. It runs some eighty miles down the edge of California from Carmel to San Luis Obispo. There are no power lines for much of its length. I lived in a tent pitched on a south facing slope twenty-three hundred feet above the sea, through all seasons of Big Sur mediterranean climate.

It sounds idyllic, and it was. But violating this chastity of wildness were flights of experimental aircraft and things that might not be so easily identified as aircraft flying low in the dark, so low I could see the heads of the crews bathed in the red glow of flight decks. One of these craft, I know now, was a prototype of the B-1 bomber, but I will never forget that night when the strange whoosh of its engines jerked me from sleep, and I gazed in horrified fascination at the bizarre shape skimming the moutain at treetop level. In daylight hours B-52’s patrolled high overhead, and sometimes the shriek of fighter bombers – planes with tail configurations even a commercial airline captain could not identify – would ricochet off the sea and reverberate against the cliffs.

I got to know the regulars among the pilots. We developed a strange, waving acquaintance, an eerie well-wishing between people dedicated to opposite ends and means. They knew I was a nun from my tunic and my location; I knew they carried nuclear weapons.

maggie ross

You don’t look back along time but down though it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

margaret atwood, cat’s eye

We’re standing in the road looking at a dead fawn. His truck facing town, mine headed toward home. It appears to be sleeping on the double yellow, curled as if in tall grass or on a down comforter in a video someone has posted on YouTube about her pet deer. No sign of collision or gunshot, garrotting, heart attack: nothing but spots, cuteness. The name on his door means he works on the natural gas pipeline that’ll run from West Virginia to North Carolina. The company that pays him has a reputation for ruin worse than syphilis. Employees have been told to stay away from locals. They stick to a h.otel near the freeway with a decor I’d call modern roach; they drink there, hone boredom, look at stars. We both crouch to make sure the fawn is dead. ‘What the fuck,’ he says, staring at the desert of my face, where there’s no rain or hope, only cactus, as I search the dry lake-bed of his. He looks back at the fawn, brings his hands together as if waiting for a Communion host, makes a scooping motion with his hands, then slides his eyes to the side of the road: I’m being asked to help save a dead fawn from the bonus carnage of traffic, the shredding that suggests life isn’t just delicate but deserves to be erased. We are the briefest couple joined by common cause, move the fawn and stand briefly as men who have respected loss for sentimental reasons. Then nod, become ghosts of a moment we are the custodians of, holders of the unholdable, wind telling the story of itself to itself.

bill hicok