Author: Rachel Sally

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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by Rachel Sally

A Little Bit More

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so?
It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.
And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.
What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store.
What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.

—Dr. Seuss

Merry Christmas to all.

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by Rachel Sally

Neutron Star

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking

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