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“I can't explain more than jot of how I feel about you but as long as there is a you I have joy in my bones. The fact that there was a you is a joy beyond calculation. It hurt when you were born and it hurts still.”
― Mink River: A Novel
― Mink River: A Novel
“There are halibut as big as doors in the ocean down below the town, flapskimming on the murky ocean floor with vast skates and rays and purple crabs and black cod large as logs, and sea lions slashing through the whip-forests of bull kelp and eelgrass and sugar wrack, and seals in the rockweed and giant perennial kelp and iridescent kelp and iridescent fish and luminous shrimp too small to see with the naked eye but billions of which feed the gray whales which slide hugely slowly by like rubbery zeppelins twice a year, north in spring and south in fall.
Salmonberries, thimbleberries, black raspberries, gooseberries, bearberries, snowberries, salal berries, elderberries, blackberries along the road and by the seasonal salt marshes north and south.
The ground squirrels burrow along the dirt banks of the back roads, their warren of mysterious holes, the thick scatter of fine brown soil before their doorsteps, the flash of silver-gray on their back fur as they rocket into the bushes; the bucks and does and fawns in the road in the morning, their springy step as they slip away from the gardens they have been eating; the bobcat seen once, at dusk, its haunches jacked up like a teenager's hot-rodding car; the rumor of cougar in the hills; the coyotes who use the old fire road in the hills; the tiny mice and bats one sometimes finds long dead and leathery like ancient brown paper; the little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels in the spruces and pines - Douglas squirrels, they are, their very name remembering that young gentleman botanist who wandered near these hills centuries ago.
The herons in marshes and sinks and creeks and streams and on the beach sometimes at dusk; and the cormorants and pelicans and sea scoters and murres (poor things so often dead young on the beach after the late-spring fledging) and jays and crows and quorking haunted ravens (moaning Poe! Poe! at dusk) especially over the wooded hills, and the goldfinches mobbing thistles in the meadowed hills, and sometimes a falcon rocketing by like a gleeful murderous dream, and osprey of all sizes all along the Mink like an osprey police lineup, and the herring gulls and Caspian terns and arctic terns, and the varied thrushes in wet corners of thickets, and the ruffed grouse in the spruce by the road, and the quail sometimes, and red-tailed hawks floating floating floating; from below they look like kites soaring brownly against the piercing blue sky, which itself is a vast creature bluer by the month as summer deepens into crispy cold fall.”
― Mink River: A Novel
Salmonberries, thimbleberries, black raspberries, gooseberries, bearberries, snowberries, salal berries, elderberries, blackberries along the road and by the seasonal salt marshes north and south.
The ground squirrels burrow along the dirt banks of the back roads, their warren of mysterious holes, the thick scatter of fine brown soil before their doorsteps, the flash of silver-gray on their back fur as they rocket into the bushes; the bucks and does and fawns in the road in the morning, their springy step as they slip away from the gardens they have been eating; the bobcat seen once, at dusk, its haunches jacked up like a teenager's hot-rodding car; the rumor of cougar in the hills; the coyotes who use the old fire road in the hills; the tiny mice and bats one sometimes finds long dead and leathery like ancient brown paper; the little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels in the spruces and pines - Douglas squirrels, they are, their very name remembering that young gentleman botanist who wandered near these hills centuries ago.
The herons in marshes and sinks and creeks and streams and on the beach sometimes at dusk; and the cormorants and pelicans and sea scoters and murres (poor things so often dead young on the beach after the late-spring fledging) and jays and crows and quorking haunted ravens (moaning Poe! Poe! at dusk) especially over the wooded hills, and the goldfinches mobbing thistles in the meadowed hills, and sometimes a falcon rocketing by like a gleeful murderous dream, and osprey of all sizes all along the Mink like an osprey police lineup, and the herring gulls and Caspian terns and arctic terns, and the varied thrushes in wet corners of thickets, and the ruffed grouse in the spruce by the road, and the quail sometimes, and red-tailed hawks floating floating floating; from below they look like kites soaring brownly against the piercing blue sky, which itself is a vast creature bluer by the month as summer deepens into crispy cold fall.”
― Mink River: A Novel
“Consider the book and the magazine and the newspaper as technology. They have myriad access points. They are portable. They require no plug nor battery. They can be consumed while supine or in a sampan or at sea. They are recyclable. They can be consumed repeatedly and in some cases should be. They can be operated by infants or elders. They are not draped by safety strictures. They pass easily into hundreds of languages. They are blessedly silent in a world of wheedling. They are designed for your hands. Most of them are substantial in a world of illusion. They can last for thousands of years. They are envelopes for ideas. They are objects of grace and beauty. They are envelopes for epiphanies. They harbor hope. They have heft. They wait for you to find them. They grow battered and beloved. Even when ancient they are filled with verve and brio. They preserve voices. They are immortal. They are extraordinary. We take them for granted. Perhaps that is what we do with what we love.”
― Grace Notes Paperback – October 1, 2011
― Grace Notes Paperback – October 1, 2011
“Neawanaka is a song sung by a wren in the rain.”
― Mink River
― Mink River
“Sometimes I think that all people in all time must have the same joys and sorrows, says Nora. Everyone thinks the old day were better, or that they were harder, and that modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people's hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn't changed at all. It's just the shapes of lives that change, not lives themselves.”
― Mink River: A Novel
― Mink River: A Novel
“Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart.”
― Mink River: A Novel
― Mink River: A Novel
“To be born, in a headish manner of speaking, is to commence the long slow process of dying. But to be born is also to begin being alive in a body in a world - an incredible gift if, like me, you're incapable or giving birth to yourself or of creating a world. So why put it the head's way? My head tells me daily that I've been slowly dying for fifty years now and that I'll probably die painfully of cancer so it might not be a bad idea to slash my wrists while I've got the strength. But my heart tells me that it's immensely grateful for the whole unpredictable extravaganza that is life.”
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“[…] I also know, with all my hoary muddled heart, that we are carved of immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall.”
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“It's easy to love someone healthy and happy.
What if I couldn't love him?
What if he was so damaged that I prayed for him to die?
Would those prayers be for good or evil?
I don't have anything sweet or wise to say about those thoughts. I can't report that I found new courage in God, or that God gave me strength to face my fears, or that my wife's love saved me, or anything cool and poetic like that. I just tell you that I had those thoughts, late at night, in the dark, and they haunt me still. I can't even push them across the page here and have them sit between you and me unattached to either of us, for they are bout to me always, like the dark fibers of my heart. For our hearts are not pure; our hearts are filled with need and greed as much as with love and grace; and we wrestle with our hearts all the time. The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are. It never stops. We are never complete. We are verbs. What we want to be is never what we are. Not yet. Maybe that's why we have these relentless engines in our chests, driving us forward toward what we might be.”
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What if I couldn't love him?
What if he was so damaged that I prayed for him to die?
Would those prayers be for good or evil?
I don't have anything sweet or wise to say about those thoughts. I can't report that I found new courage in God, or that God gave me strength to face my fears, or that my wife's love saved me, or anything cool and poetic like that. I just tell you that I had those thoughts, late at night, in the dark, and they haunt me still. I can't even push them across the page here and have them sit between you and me unattached to either of us, for they are bout to me always, like the dark fibers of my heart. For our hearts are not pure; our hearts are filled with need and greed as much as with love and grace; and we wrestle with our hearts all the time. The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are. It never stops. We are never complete. We are verbs. What we want to be is never what we are. Not yet. Maybe that's why we have these relentless engines in our chests, driving us forward toward what we might be.”
―
“One thing you learn as a teacher is never to call out a student in front of the other students; a direct attack sends students diving for cover behind their masks and walls and shields, and those defenses are already so formidable that students sometimes trap themselves behind their walls and cannot easily scale them, and so imprison themselves for years at a time.”
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“We love so helplessly. We can't control our love or understand it or even articulate it much beyond the banal. And there are so many forms and levels and shapes and flavors and speeds and depths and topographies and landscapes and colors and musics of love that the default cultural concept of love as romance only is a willful cultural addiction to microcosm. Romance is a small sea in a vast ocean. The heart leaps in so many directions at once.”
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“Each [hummingbird] visits a thousand flowers a day. They can drive at sixty miles and hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymmphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of a pebble, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.”
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“I don't think I ever fully understood the deep almost inexplicable love of the Christ for us, why he would accept his own early tortured death as a sacrifice, until I had been a father for a while.”
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“I do wish a child is granted unto us. I would wish many a child. People say pray for the baby and the Lord will provide but that is not how things happen. You do not ask for things and you get the thing. The Lord is not a suggesting box. That is silly talk. The way it is is you dream a thing and work for a thing and make the way easy for it and then maybe that thing be born. That is how it happens.”
― Grace Notes Paperback – October 1, 2011
― Grace Notes Paperback – October 1, 2011
“The heart is the first organ to form. It is smaller than a comma when it begins and ends up bigger than a fist. Every cell in it is capable of pulsing. No one knows how that could be. The pulse begins when a baby is about twenty days old. No one knows quite why it happens then. The pulse then continues, on average, for about two billion pulses. No one knows why there are that many. Or that few. Why not one billion each? Why not twenty billion? Mayflies to mastodons, beetles to bison, prophets to poets, infants to those who commit infanticide, all are issued the same number of pulses to do with what they will. Tell me, asks the great quiet American poet Mary Oliver, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
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