Category: almond

by Rachel Sally

Frost and Desolation

I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.
Do you understand this feeling?
This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes.
Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even… a mouse.

Happy Christmas all!

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by Rachel Sally

Swallowed With All Hope

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale, Dan Albergotti

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by Rachel Sally

Back With Their Flocks

When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.

—Howard Thurman

Merry Christmas!
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by Rachel Sally

Big Time

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years.
Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars.
Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It’s hard to live in all those kinds of times.
Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin

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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

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

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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