Author: Rachel Sally

by Rachel Sally

Untold Mischief

“What a wonderful thing the skin is! It is the largest and most important integument of the whole human organism!
What millions of pores it contains! The minutest aperture might absorb the deadliest poison.
Once in contact with the surface of the body, whether the particle be held in a miasma, or dissolved in the water of ablution, the pore, like a fatal canal, conveys it into the system, whence its eradication may be impossible, and where it may generate untold mischief.”

— “Skin, Baths, Bathing, and Soap,” Francis Pears for Pears Soap, 1859

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by Rachel Sally

Silver as the Rainbow Scales

“I’m afraid of getting older”, that’s what I learned to say
‘Cause society has given me the words to think that way.
The message spins and spirals, “Don’t get saggy, don’t get grey”
But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulders.

My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, they sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue.
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?

So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair,
Let me dance in front of people without a care.

—Incomprehensible, Big Thief

Happy birthday to me (from me).

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by Rachel Sally

Might Laurel Grow

When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow.

—Andrew Marvell, The Garden, 1681

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by Rachel Sally

Edible, or Beautiful

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you,
home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container
or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then
I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

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by Rachel Sally

Douzième

And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
You need distance, interval.
The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon.
The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Happy twelfth birthday to La Pêche Fraîche.

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by Rachel Sally

Entanglement

“A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things.
The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today.
Nature is an event that never stops.
As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed,
‘We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.’”

—Merlin Sheldrake

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