if we can just ... get ... through... this one.

I’ll hang on grab onto your feet
Someone else holds tied to my shoelaces
When their trouser leg tears, runs and stops at the seam to keep us
dangled together
Until help finds us here

Terrifying best, days of our lives
We’re hanging on the best days of our lives
No two ways about it, best days of our lives
They’re coming right up, if we can just get through this one.

- (Imogen Heap, "Not now but soon")

content

I feel imperviously content; I feel like everything is in its right place, and that I am on the right track, and that everything is going to be alright, no matter what happens. Whatever happens. I am grateful to the Lord for that kind of peace. It clears the mind and the eyes, which is good, because I have a lot to do. And for now, I am perfectly capable of doing it alone, and that's fine. I have indeed been blessed, and it's been a good day, and once again, I am free and clear, full-weight free. And I'm not worried about anything, really. I'm not ecstatic or anything, just not bothered. And that's okay.

You walk along the sand with a fist in the air, from which a stream of sand falls like a curtain. The fist is small, frail, but the sand doesn't stop, and the curtain falls behind you like a rainstorm, an iron curtain.

You are wearing the spike coat, and the long red-tipped, black and white striped spines flow down your back like the raised hackles of a wolf.

You will never surrender, because you are home now, and the sea knows it. The sea, and only the sea, understands.

You breathe the weight of wet salt, which hardens and strengthens your bones, and the voices of your shadow echo and echo and echo in the relentless surf. The sky is white, a silent blank wet canvas, and the sand under your feet is smooth as the back of a seal, firm as stone.

Around you are friends. The Four whirl like dervishes in their bright round robes, so colorful that they are almost incandescent: Sun-and-Starlight whirls in his broad sun/moon mask, his flowing twilight robe with the embroidered silver stars, his outstretched hands painted gold.

Leaves-of-Trees wears her copper and gold crown, a wreath of oak and maple, and her deep forest green robe skims the sand as she turns, its hem of copper and gold-veined leaves, her hands and eyelids painted copper.

Flames-of-Fire burns. Her long flame-colored veil shimmers as if the sun were on it, and the sand under her thin white feet glows red as coals.

Ice-and-Thunder spins like a tornado, his light silver and grey robes flashing electric diamond glints, his hands and face and hood painted dark charcoal grey, almost black, although his eyes are so pale and light that they are electric, catching and violently reflecting any hint of light.

You throw the sand into the air, throw your head back, and scream.

You move beyond the Four. Way out to sea you can sea the silhouettes of the Sunbearers. It is day, but they are sleeping, their great delicate forms folded into the soft grey horizon. They have let the sun loose today, and he has gone, pillowing his keepers in the seamless silent clouds.

The sea roars. You turn and run at it and roar back, shaking a long iron spear over your head, carving the mist like butter, although unlike butter, the mist drifts back and heals, leaving no trace of the spear. You will fight tonight, and the sea will be red, and knows it, and is apprehensive.

You are exhausted. The spike coat weighs on your back like the inhabitants of a great city. You walk in your spines, on the hard fine sand, and you lower your spear. You walk, and you lower your head. You walk, and lower your hands, and the spines drag fine lines in the smooth back of the sea seal. The sun is dead. You walk, and fall to your knees, onto your elbows, and as the spear rusts away into the wet sand, you weep. The gulls hear, and cry out to the sea, which understands. Great drops fall from your face, great salty drops of sea. The sand, already wet, doesn't notice. The sea sees, and the sea, and only the sea, understands.

parable of the grapevine (although there probably already is one)

These Northwestern summer nights are perfect -- cool and soft and limpid, tranquil and dark. I went outside last night at dusk because I could see a breeze through the window and needed to quiet for a moment the thinking frenzy I've been spinning circles in over the last month. I found the swing in the big pine between our house and the neighbors's and swung into the breeze, leaning back to watch the branches whirl silently overhead. It helped, until I spun the swing right back into my mind-trap, got mad, got off, and kicked the swing. Tromped through the ivy and into the backyard, where I dusted off an old wicker chair and sat for nearly an hour under the pergola, which supports our last remaining grapevine. Over me and the pergola and the grapevine loomed a giant oak from the back-neighbors yard, swaying and fluttering gracefully against the deep Parrish blue sky. I looked up at the grapevine, which was trying to tell me something.

One of its long green tendrils stretched out from the pergola over my head, and i wondered what it was reaching for, since the nearest stable object was still a good 12 feet away. I watched it reaching out hopefully, putting out tiny new leaves and feelers that ended up curling together around nothing, just hanging there. There were countless other young tendrils doing the same thing, poking out from all sides of the pergola in all directions. Some had connected, curling tightly around each other, creating points of strength, of reinforcement. All of these tendrils, however, could only stretch out so far from the pillars and the pergola before dropping under their own weight. Mostly they didn't, I assume because they knew when to quit.

There was one old main branch, and all it grew entwined around and was supported by the pergola. On top of the pergola (can you tell I like the word pergola?) grew most of the broad green sun-soaking leaves, quite beautiful and healthy and young, and the tendrils. From the underside of the pergola hung a bunch of dead black branches and broken tendrils, old dead matter from years gone by, hidden artfully under the living and seemingly perfect outer covering of fresh leaves.

It occurred to me that without constantly reaching and stretching its tendrils and feelers out into thin air, even without having anything to cling to, the grapevine wouldn't grow. Even though it didn't reach anything solid, the reaching tendril grew, and expanded, beautified, and in its own small way, strengthened the whole vine. I also saw that without the stability of the pergola, the grapevine would never have gotten so big, so healthy, so beautiful, fruitful, or useful. The one branch, although it provided life to the whole plant, couldn't possibly support its own weight, and would've trailed haplessly along the ground. And although it hid all that old dead matter so artfully, I wondered whether it would be healthier or more fruitful if the lingering rotten things were pruned away. And I wondered then what would happen if even most of the living green stuff were pruned ruthlessly away - what would the grapevine do? The answer of course is simple: put out those little tendrils in faith and trust and grow back, every time.

Life applications? I think so. I said a little prayer, smiled, and went back inside.

omega dog

Something's wrong, and I can't quite figure it out. I feel like I'm hanging out on the edge of spontaneous combustion. I'm angry. I don't get angry. It's like oil on a freshwater lake - I'll get frustrated, maybe the skin of oil on top will bubble and ignite once in awhile, but it never lasts very long or goes very deep. But not now - I feel like a chunk of water-logged rocket fuel. Dry me out and I could start a war. I could end a war. A good hour of hand-to-hand combat might help. I'd lose of course, but it would be good for me. If I won, I wouldn't know what to do. It would go against the laws of history and nature, and it would make it worse. If I lost, it would put me back in my place and I would remember that no, I don't have enough backing logically, politically, or materially, to start a war. I'd close my eyes, bruised, and ask myself why it has to take pain to teach me what I really am and what I'm here for. And humility and humiliation would push me back into the groove of peace.

I just got back from a lovely trip to Italy with true friends, I'm chillin at home in my beloved Northwest, with my family, the most loving and validating people in my life. I have music again, and played with Libby and the kitty and the beardies this morning, and all should be better than it's been in months. So much for clarity. So that in itself is frustrating.

Maybe it's just persistent old habits. I can't express in words how much I hate old shadows, or how hard it is to get rid of them when you're in their old stomping grounds. But enough of that. No excuses. Dadgummit, it all just comes back to me, and I have to remind myself that at times like this it's silly to look for external solutions to internal problems. Isn't it?

Why the heck am I writing this? I probably shouldn't post it. Hang it all, maybe I will.

now and endless

I love where I am right now. Life is perfectly balanced on the precipice of change. Important paths are converging and diverging, and I am poised to circumnavigate half the globe. The butterfly effect is taking wing all over the place and it's stunningly beautiful to watch. It is the hand of God moving over the world in infinitesimally subtle and cosmic ways. A glance here, a word there, the way the sun glinted in the eyes of someone you may never talk to – these are the things that are constantly changing our lives and molding our futures. We live in such a delicate balance, but it all turns out right in the end. Somehow it always does. Isn't that magnificent? Never have I found such a firm underlying state of peace. It's not permanent, I'm sure, but it's just the kind that could be, if everything stayed balanced just right. But nothing is more transitory and elusive than perfect balance. It's like at the turn of fall, when the trees start to think about changing, and the maples send faint little red veins through the green of their leaves in preparation for the flood of color to follow; or like in the initiation of spring, when the most delicate fragile green things gently push at the heavy layers of greyness and decay from last year's end, and the skeletal trees swath themselves in thin green clouds so faint you can only see them peripherally. We're talking phases that linger only a few short days. So achingly beautiful that it's what I look forward to all the rest of the year.

There is a strange steady exhilaration in everything right now, and I have the strangest feeling that this summer is somehow going to be really important, even pivotal, in the long run. I've been feeling that for months now. And I don't think it's just that I'm going to Italy for a little while. Just all the changes flying so thick and fast – new paradigms, new people, new discoveries, new situations and new revelations. Like some of the old boxes I've lived in for so long are falling apart and away and there are new horizons everywhere.

Anyhow. I'm running out of words. Sorry, apparently I get kind of obsessive about life sometimes, and then make you all listen to/read it. But life is cool, you gotta admit that. Endless opportunities. We live in the day and age where the line between dreams, ideas, and reality is fading away. No joke. Sometimes it's kind of scary, really. In an incredibly awesome way.

I just figured out life. Hah!

So. This is how it works. We are here to learn to find/have/create joy. There is no joy without growth. There is no growth without opposition. Therefore: not only can we find joy in adversity, but we cannot have joy without it. Or conversely; opposition and adversity (when survived) lead to growth, which leads to joy. Notice my word choice; JOY. Not happiness, which tends to be less deep and more temporary, and can come from things like comfort, pleasure, validation, sunshine and rainbows, etc. Joy, which is what God experiences and wants us to experience, must be earned, and it ain't no happy-meal prize. Which means that when they are handled rightly, the rough spots in life should end up being the best things that ever happened to us.

Does that make any sense?

Let's back this up. President Thomas S. Monson obviously understood this principle when he spoke in last month's General Conference. He related one of the most heartbreaking stories I've ever heard, about a woman who lost her husband to the violence of WWII and watched her four children die slowly of the cold and starvation of having to travel on foot from East Prussia to West Germany in the dead of winter. She dug the graves of her first three children in the frozen ground with a tablespoon, and for her last child, all she had left was her hands. When she arrived at her destination, alone and with nothing, she was in the advanced stages of starvation. President Monson said she spoke in a church meeting soon afterwards, "stating that of all the ailing people in her saddened land, she was one of the happiest, because she knew that God lived, that Jesus is the Christ, and that He died and was resurrected so that we might live again." President Monson closed his talk with these words: "My beloved brothers and sisters, fear not. Be of good cheer. The future is as bright as your faith."

I think to many of us who were raised LDS, this principle is sometimes fairly obvious. Sometimes not. It's all through the scriptures (check out 2 Nephi 2 for instance), the words of the prophets, and for most of us, life experience. I don't know why this just seems so important right now. I mean, it always is, but right now the concept of the symbiosis of joy and pain seems especially pertinent.

Let's be honest. We live in kind of sobering times. A lot of people are scared. Fear and despair run rampant over the earth, corruption and deception and uncertainty ooze from just about every corner, and there are wars and earthquakes and all sorts of stuff going on, both at home and abroad. We live in the day prophesied when "the love of many shall wax cold, and men's hearts shall fail them." And no wonder. Life ain't getting any easier, and certainly no less complicated. But ladies and gentlemen, we have it good, and we have nothing to worry about. "If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear." I used to read that to mean that those who are sufficiently prepared will be able to avoid a lot of the hardships that those less prepared will have to face. Now I'm not so sure; I think it's not how much we can avoid or escape hardship so much as how we approach it, and those who are prepared shall not fear because: A. they know Who is in charge, and where to go for guidance, revelation, and light. B. They understand that they can choose how they react to adversity, both internally and externally (read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl). C. They understand that as long as they are doing what they know is right, nothing can ever be permanently wrong. (Conversely, those who choose not to live according to their better judgement will soon find that nothing will ever be permanently right. => Fear.) Those who are prepared know how to trust the Lord in all circumstances, and know that "all things shall work together for their good." Like my grandma used to say: "Everything turns out all right in the end, and if it ain't right yet, it ain't the end yet."

I did it again. I'm so preachy this week! But you know what I mean. Actually, I think this is mostly just for me; I've realized recently how grateful I am for the rough things I've had to go through - nothing hugely tragic or heart-wrenching, but you know. Everyone hits points in their lives when they feel like they are living by a thread. It's truly amazing how much richer my life has become after I've come out of those dark spots. And man, how grateful I am for the strength of that little thread!

So all I'm trying to say is, chin up. Be of good cheer, because you don't necessarily have to eke out a meager survival from those hard times if you do your best to squeeze every drop of wisdom you can get out of that lemon. And as to the future, guys, it's gonna be great. Crazy, but great. :)

Let's be friends, people!

Hmm. Life is so interesting and turbulent right now. It's kind of incredible really; this last week has been eventful enough to fill a month, and this last month has been enough probably to fill almost a year. Not in any really obvious way though. Sometimes paradigm shifts fall thick and fast.

One of the big things that's struck me again recently is the overwhelming need for gratitude in our lives; for the very air we breathe, and especially for those who breathe it with us. People, we have so much to be grateful for. If you are reading this, listen up. Exhibit A; you can read. Props to you. Literacy and education are the lot of a privileged few in our wide world. B; you have access to a computer and knowledge of how to use it. You have the most sophisticated networking, computing, research, and communication technology known to man at your fingertips. C; you probably live in America, or some other first-world English-speaking country, or you have lived there because that's where you met me. Don't even get me started on that. D; you have the time and leisure to read this at all and give thought to your identity, your life-direction, your own potential, and you are able to choose how to use the time you have been given. Seriously folks, we've got it good. And no, I'm not trying to guilt-trip anyone into gratitude, because that totally doesn't work.

It just hits me now and then how ridiculously blessed I have been in so many ways. For starters: I can't really remember a time when I have NOT been surrounded by really wonderful, loving, supportive, amazing, outstanding people. You are all awesome. Thank you for your love, patience, and kindness. Most of you will probably never know how much I have learned from you personally. Many of you I continue to learn from. A few of you have changed my life in more significant ways than you may ever realize.

I believe that people are basically good. I believe that each of us is a son or daughter of God, that He loves us and expects us to live up to our full potential, which is usually much greater than any of us would dare to imagine. I believe that each person has the potential to do much good, to become truly great, and that there is a spark of divinity in each soul which propels us towards living meaningful lives and surrounding ourselves with that which is beautiful, praiseworthy, light, and good. I believe there is a light in your eyes. You have the power to make something of yourself. One of my favorite quotes (I wish I remembered who it was from exactly): “There is little difference between the great men and women of the world and those who have wasted their lives. Those who have been successful have simply made better decisions.”

So yeah, okay, I am kind of waxing preachy. I'll just say this much more: guys, be nice to each other. People are cool; every one has something glorious and great inside them, and at some point every one has or will have something inside them that is incredibly wounded and raw. We've all been there. Let's try to see each other not only as human beings, but as people. Let's try to see each other as what we could be. And let us remember that nobody can get there alone.

In summary, let's be friends. And let's all try a little harder to understand what that means.

Conference photos you won't see in the Ensign.

Honoring the Lizard of Oz

This is from the first time I met the beardies. They belonged to the super sweet family I was working for at the time, but they are ours now. Their names are Crikers and Beaut, in honor of the late Steve Erwin, I believe. They look fearsome for the first thirty seconds or so, and then they just look sort of earnestly vacant. What surprised me most was their fragility, and warmth. Normally when I think of a lizard, say, an iguana, I think of something cold and slimy-hard like a crab, or leathery like that little rubbery plastic alligator we had for years until its bottom jaw eventually got ripped off by a couple of vigorously well-meaning tykes. But these little guys, just beneath their fearsomely spiky skins (which looked almost like exoskeletons, but were thinner than mine), were as soft and delicate-boned as rabbits. One hung down the front of my shirt like a huge brooch, curling his sharp little claws into my mercifully thick sweater. The other draped himself across my shoulder. Mom, who was with me, held one in the crook of her arm like a baby and rocked it for awhile. She discovered that when she turned, the lizard would keep his head in the same place and let his little body pivot around it like a door-hinge. The one I was holding did that too. One of the Thomson boys said his grandmother’s chickens do the same thing. He said he could lift any of them up, down, side to side, and it would stretch its little neck as far as it could to keep its head at the same point on the x, y, and z planes as it had started. With that kind of 3D precision, I think we should start hiring lizards and chickens to be fighter pilots. Who knows? World peace could be just around the corner.

Supermassive Black Hole

Last night dreamed big again. I don't remember what I started out doing, something social but boring I figure. It must have been boring, because somehow I got detached from the globe and started drifting out into space. I picked up speed the farther I went, and wrapped my arms around my head to ward off all the planets and stars I was bumping into along the way. There were lots of glimmering clouds and arms of galaxies with stars and all sorts of stuff in them, and as I flew by I got to thinking I must be on some sort of "Powers of Ten" journey and would soon be able to see the whole universe before I drifted off into infinite space. I didn't get that far, but far enough out to see a whole bunch of individual galaxies. Many of the spiral ones had rays and curtains of light refracting out in all colors from supermassive black holes at their cores. As I passed through one of these curtains/columns of iridescent light I felt a tug from the immense gravitational hurricane at the center and started to worry. The pull of the black hole was such that it sent ripples and distortions through all of the surrounding light, and felt like a current pulling towards a maelstom in the middle of the sea. So I started to swim, and barely reached the other side of the light/rainbow/gravity column before I would've hit the event horizon. I kept drifting on, a little shook up, knowing that with all these supermassive black holes floating around and me with neither rudder nor engine, there was only so long I could last. I hit the next gravity column (which was really quite beautiful, like rainbows and the aurora borealis - they all were that way), felt that massive tug and thought that was it. But when I got to the event horizon, the great heavy darkness in front of me dissolved and changed, and I stood up on the floor of a room covered and lined with old brown paper sacks. There was some kind of square black processing machine (like the x-ray machines you put your stuff through in an airport) on a long fold-up table that was slowly sucking in and digesting one long sheet of this rainbow material, construction paper or something, although nothing was coming out on the other side. There were two or three people in the room: Krystin and Allison were there, and maybe one or two others. I think I was slightly annoyed, or just puzzled - I don't remember, because then I woke up.

Black and White and Red all over...

Cover them in black and white stripes. Dust and picks drum the red clay road, kicking up rusty clouds the size of carpetbaggers' pockets.

Humdrum rumbles the hole in the window – sucks downwind and I hear the rhythm of the men on the road. Their faces are rosy as the pale sky cools. A magpie lands on an old barn. Coal piles shift and crackle under sifted snow next to an iron-red stove.

The children cry as their mothers knead. Flour sifts through the air around them, cottony clouds, sticky on the tongue. The black bowls fill with sugar and cherries. The ovens gape their wide red mouths. They are first fed, then feed.

Black skirts swim around my ankles, the rim of white hugs my cheekbones as I smile. I hold a thick red book above my head, its pages flap open at the vaulted rafters. Quiet now. The children are fed, their books are open, the room is cold, their noses are red. Clouds roll blankly against the iron windows.

Appleskin breaks at the blade of a knife. The flesh under the blood red is snowy, and the seeds nestle like negative diamonds deep at the heart, dark and smooth as the pupils of eyes.

Listen to a black violin. The man under his snowy hair strokes the strings, sounds like the color of your heart.

The man's hands raise against the air. His shirt is white. The gun is black, and quick, and dark. Death follows in flowing scarves of red.

Newborn cries, the whites of its eyes and the red little mouth are round. Black is the tiny fuzz of hair. You are newer than copper pennies that glint like fire on the asphalt.

A beat of drums pounds red in your bones as you run from the moon, bathing you in white, in silver, in the colors of the old. You breathe hard with your red mouth and run and run and run. You run from the shadows, and you run from the light. You run from the only thing you cannot leave behind. You run, maybe forever, into the blackest night you ever saw.

One day the road will end, and the sun will set and flush against sharp black mountains. You will pause for breath then, and you will see, in the distance, a humble white light. You will watch the sun and say a prayer, and then you will run home.

Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY&feature=related

One of the cooler videos I've seen recently. I guess you'll just have to copy-paste the link.

Great Blue Wolf

I see Great Blue in the mountains. He is the color of dusk clouds, his eyes are pieces of the salmon moon that the sun leaves behind the horizon. He is the color of dying light. He is so big – I see his long jawline in the foothills, his great soft footfalls rumble the pavement next to me like distant thunder, his dark lush pelt floats and ripples in the breeze as if it were alive itself. He is silent as an owl, watchful as a hawk, steady as the mountains. The snow dusts his back like silver. He doesn't shake it off as he looks at me with those great warm eyes. Great Blue is silent. If he howls I've never heard it. Maybe I have. I know he does. He appears and disappears as invisibly as clouds. He walks the backs of the hills and the peaks to the east. When he is still, he is part of them.

I think he must be mother nature's dog.

=
I wrote this a month or so ago. A couple years back I got to go to the Colorado Wolf Wildlife Preserve with my grandparents. One or two of the wolves let us touch them, and we got to howl with all the wolves and coyotes and foxes on the property, which was awesome. I've always had a thing for wolves, and Great Blue just sort of evolved out of that. I wrote a short kid's book I stilll intend to illustrate about him and his pack and a little girl and her blanket. We'll see if that ends up going anywhere ....

Fly!

Today everything was singing. The mountains, white in snow and cloud speckled by trees and shadows like owl feathers, were singing “Love the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” I heard them through the pavement; a low rumble like thunder. The trees reaching overhead were sleeping, but in their stillest places I knew they were more awake than I was. There was music in everything, and when I closed my eyes I opened other eyes and saw the most beautiful colors and songs wrapping themselves around everything. It took my breath away, and I almost stopped in my tracks, even though I was still on campus caught in the flow of between-class traffic. I had to resist the urge to spread my arms and let the colors and the soft inviting sky carry me away to heaven. I only resisted because there were people around. I was sure that if I stepped in just the right place I could kick off into the atmosphere and ride the wind over the mountains to find the places where snow is made. I would talk to the stars until it got too cold and I'd have to come back. There has been the most glorious stillness in the past two days; in the stillness I can hear and see things – colors and music and the love of the Lord, the voices of the mountains and the bones and joints of the earth moving so smoothly underneath, a vast old clock winding everything closer together. Peace, peace, peace. Everything had meaning, and I was a part of it all. There were messages from heaven in every little breeze or falling leaf, and I heard them. By the time I got home I could see that my shadow had wings.

Nothing is impossible anymore. Anything we can conceive of, we can accomplish. Most things we dream up, somebody has done already. Some say there is no originality left in the universe, but they are usually interrupted by people doing original things. The world will surprise you as much as you allow it to. We let walls fall so easily around us, we think they have always been there. There are no walls. There. Are. No. Walls...

Tomorrow I will spread my wings, and if I succeed I will return and show you all how close we are to the sun. But I guarantee somebody else will have beaten me to it.

Getting outside does stuff to you...

One day I was a woman king.
Swords swung at my side all the way up to the hills, where I held them like flowers.

My eyes held the golden mountains, behind my teeth were songs and war cries. I was as a warm stone. The wet air shielded me in armor light and strong of cobweb and silk and I was not afraid of men, or of shades, or of anybody.

I walked upon drums and felt the heartbeat of the earth slip under me like waves. I wanted to kiss her brow, the mother earth, who watches over me, a daughter and heir.

Branches pushed all directions with tattered leaves, to remind my hands that they have learned signs and symbols used by the silent; I am insured for the day my words fade and I have nothing now to fear but sleep.

I reached out and touched the air; it lay soft and cool at my fingertips, stirring very gently, like the breathing of birds, the soft grey reverence of doves.

I turn on the skin of the earth, I turn like leaves to the sun. We told the sun to bleed once, and it obeyed, leaving a deep red streak along the last horizon of the day. A moment later clouds closed over it like tears, and something soaring on black wings screamed overhead.

A gull calls across a thousand miles and my hands drop, remembering when once he held my heart in his hands and told me it was heavy as the sea. It was then I watched his wrists turn upwards, dark and worn thin enough to see through all the veins.

All I lack is flight, now, and victory. But I won't catch that gull.

My swords swing at my sides like breezes, sweeping away the shades of past and present, crushing through the ice of culture and brick, slitting the throats of the stone-faced and empty, who may never know.

The sea runs still in my blood, all of it, but the mountains are in me now, growing like ash grows along the arms of a burning tree.

Kind of absurd, really
bitter, like lack of sleep
but comfortable because I know its anatomy
and I know what to expect;
that the taste of salt is safer than to guess at the flavor and texture of honey.

But you blink for a moment, for a night only, and in the morning the sun will bring armfuls of new light and new bees. The salt wanes then, and honey colors the world like Midas, and you find even your footprints filled with the sweetest softest gold.

Maybe then somebody will teach us how to open our eyes.