Haven't done a year's-best-reading list since the first year I kept a blog. Every year could have this: an expression of gratitude for the astonishing and wonderful books that Life continually sends me. Most of which I'm not looking for. Many of which I judge by their cover, and/or some nudge of intuition, and which turn out to be exactly what I need at that moment.
Isabel Allende was one of those, 15 years ago. She was responsible, as well, for a shift in the way I read, when I made her acquaintance (also by pulling a paperback off the shelf at random). Clara the clairvoyant, central character in _The House of the Spirits_, has a custom of keeping journals. But these aren't just any old diaries filled with personal reminisces: she calls them "my books that give witness to life", and they are literally a record, a remembering, of every single event that happens on her sprawling, multigenerational, highly dysfunctional family homestead. While that was a bit much for me, I was attracted to "witness to life". To both writing and reading as ways to engage more consciously, and positively, with its currents. I began trying to balance, in journals, thought-feelings and reactions with observations, affirmations and connections-of-dots. And I started writing down memorable quotes from every book that I read. I even developed a system of symbols that recognizes the different windows onto understanding opened by these quotes. And, while I often wonder if this habit helps or limits memory, the fact is that I read and forget at almost equally rapid rates. So, if once in a while there's time to look back and wonder whether or not I learned anything in the last year, I have these transcribed lines for my witnesses.
[Note to the angry leftists in my head: Yes, as you've observed, this post will in fact occupy some time, and indulge in a fair amount of introspection. And yes, I might not normally sanction that. It's even going to reveal that I feed my mind as much with fiction as with nonfiction! But right now, it's covered: January's a month of healing. I won't be joining any of you in saving the world this month. I will rest, read, ponder, and seek out any precious lessons learned. From scholarly text, and from powerful story. For as much of Now as it takes, to feel safe and sane and sound again.]
Below, then, are my best reads of 2012. (It'd be really fun to see the lists other friends would compile!) And a quote or two from each book, to show the particular beauty that it graced me with.
10. Neil Gaiman - American Gods
All the ancient deities of the world's mythologies, having accompanied immigrants to this country over the centuries, realize that their power is fading because not enough people support them with the old practices and with belief. They convene for a showdown with the "new gods" of media, celebrity, technology, and drugs, their replacements. A lonely ex-convict named Shadow is caught up in the intrigue and discovers he has a greater role than he knew, while meeting characters on a cross-country roadtrip with names like Mr. Wednesday and Low-Key Lyesmith. Mr. Gaiman's unique mix of depth and irreverence is barely even quotable. You just had to be there.
9. David Holmgren - Permaculture
A book on systems thinking doesn't really fit into sound-bites. But here are a couple of best efforts.
"the connections between things are as important as the things themselves"
"With little experience of whole-system thinking, and such cultural impediments, we need to focus our efforts on simple and accessible whole systems before we try to amend large and complex ones. The self is the most accessible and potentially comprehensible whole system."
"While global capitalism has been like a fire converting green forests to ashes, it has likewise released potential and information from the constraints of cultural norms and institutions that were hopelessly inappropriate for dealing with a world of declining energy."
8. Octavio Paz - The Labyrinth of Solitude
This master elocutionist takes on the psychology of Mexico and the meaning of human separateness and connection.
"In the Valley of Mexico man feels himself suspended between heaven and earth, and he oscillates between contrary powers and forces, and petrified eyes, and devouring mouths. Reality -- that is, the world that surrounds us -- exists by itself here, has a life of its own, and was not invented by man as it was in the United States."
"How can we tell that man is possibility, frustrated by injustice?"
7. Camilla Gibb - Sweetness in the Belly
A sensory and heartfelt narrative of a young British woman and her memories of growing up in the city of Harar, Ethiopia, just prior to Emperor Selassie’s deposition. Honoring and questioning cultural, political and religious issues while centering on a couple of very human journeys and themes of exile and belonging. One review called it " A poem to belief and to the displaced".
"It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs."
"there's an organ without a name that only registers the invisible."
"He whispers, 'Hindus believe that the essence of the person -- the soul -- lives on, reincarnated over and over with greater maturity each time to the point where it ultimately achieves enlightenment, freedom from the body. It is what we all ultimately wish for.' Like a Sufi, I think, only a Sufi attempts to do it in a single lifetime."
6. Seyyed Hossein Nasr - The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition
An engagingly welcome combination of mind and heart: philosophy, ideology, love for beauty.
"The spiritual life may in fact be defined as the practice of techniques that enable us to forget all that we remember about the world of separation and dispersion and to remember..."
"love runs through the arteries of the universe"
"If understood spiritually, beauty becomes itself the means of recollection and the rediscovery of our true nature."
5. Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, River of Poppies, Sea of Smoke
Mr. Ghosh is my favorite new discovery, whose work I am devouring as quickly as possible. I didn't copy quotes from these because they're the kind, and the quality, of book that you just fall into and read almost without stopping. Rip-roaring adventures with a healthy dose of history, world politics, and human migrations mixed in. Pure food for the imagination and the mind. http://www.amitavghosh.com/
4. Arnold Mindell - Dreambody
Mr. Mindell draws from Jung, shamanistic studies and Australian aboriginal ways to attempt a synthesis of mind-body-psyche understanding and healing...potent medicine.
"the real body...a potential temple which is unaware of the gods it is carrying."
"Remember, if you want to learn how to heal the body you must start at home, in your own forest, in your own body. There, lying within your own symptoms is the spirit that makes you ill. But this very same spirit has the healing potion..."
(citing the Upanishads) "Yama's first message tells the young man that enlightenment -- that is, connection to the spirit -- cannot be had through wishing. It occurs only through contact with death, with body symptoms."
3. Kelley Eskridge - Solitaire/Connie Willis - Passage
These two sci-fi novels share a spot because they arrived in the same month and with the same intense relevance to present questions: how far can a person travel toward healing, within the boundaries of her own mind? And how fluid can our concepts of life and identity become while preserving our wholeness? Connie Willis writes of a pair of neurologists researching near-death experiences whose work takes some definite turns for the unexpected. Fascinating insights about our relationship to death and to facing our fears. From her book I again have no quotes; only gratitude for this: the experience of hearing the moment right after a sound had stopped.
Ms. Eskridge tells of a not-too-distant future Earth ruled by technology and dominated by the planet's first corporate-nation-state in Hong Kong, called Ko. A woman employed with Ko is framed for a terrible crime and given a choice of sentence: many years in regular prison, or 8 months in a suspended-animation virtual solitary confinement. When she chooses the latter, she embarks on a gut-wrenching inner journey through the nature of mind, reality, and self that breaks all the expectations of the technology, the system, and her own as well, and finally leads to her liberation on all levels.
"I think there's a threshold of alone that most of us can't pass beyond without some kind of profound change."
"It was inconceivable that there could be a hole in a virtual cell, where there had been none before. She sat for much too long thinking about how none of it could be true before she realized that her opinion didn't seem to matter much to the hole...Then she took a deep breath, and began to kick down the wall."
2. Belleruth Naparstek - Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal
Another book pulled off the library shelves that met exactly the need of the moment. The author worked as a therapist with the entire imaginable range of trauma and PTSD sufferers, from Vietnam vets to 9/11 survivors to adults subjected to abuse or cult practices as children. Her explanation of how trauma affects mind, body and spirit is clear and holistic, and the inclusiveness of the stories across the spectrum offers a welcome to those seeking a path to healing and to understanding the validity of their experience. Ample appendices and a set of guided meditations complement the information. This book and its quotes will most likely show up in a future post.
1. Richard Power - The Echo Maker
Yet author I'd never heard of is the creator of the most amazing thing I read all year. In a small town in central Nebraska, a young man suffers a head trauma in a highway accident and emerges with Capgras syndrome, the belief that what he perceives is not the authentic world, but that every object and every person in his life has been secretly replaced with a duplicate. His older sister and a circle of other caregivers converge on the scene, confronting troubled family history and inner demons of their own. Everyone in the central circle of characters deeply re-evaluates her/himself over the story's course. Every character exasperated me at some point, and a few redeemed themselves. Some change dramatically and others face their inability to change. This book was one incredible mind-trip, as well as a lovely homage to the Platte River landscape and its migrating sandhill crane population. But the language of the story is what stole my heart, with its shifting points of view, and particularly the trippy, disjointed attempts to capture the fractured thoughts of the man recovering from brain injury (first two quotes that follow).
"A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body.
Lasts forever: no change to measure."
"So he says nothing. Some things say him."
"Damage had somehow unblocked him, removing the mental categories that interfered with truly seeing. Assumption no longer smoothed out observation. Every glance now produced its own landscape."
Here is a statement from the author about his intent for the book:
"[The] aim in The Echo Maker is to put forward, at the same time, a glimpse of the solid, continuous, stable, perfect story we try to fashion about the world and about ourselves, while at the same time to lift the rug and glimpse the amorphous, improvised, messy, crack-strewn, gaping thing underneath all that narration. To this end, my technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process: the world is nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority."
Should you see theme or themes in this list...you'd be correct. But I repeat, I didn't go looking along any theme. Life sends what I need. A day at a time and a book at a time.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Monday, January 21, 2013
what she needed (to hear)
"I know it's been years (she says), but I am still so full of anger at him. That he just walked out of it. That he walked out of it with everything: the house, all the money, the good credit, the security. Never once apologizing, never once taking responsibility for any of it. Even though life is so good now, that anger is still alive."
I hear her loud and clear. We have this battle in common. But she's talking about a 10-year marriage. My situation lasted a year (and that was too long, by several months). I can't imagine what forgiving must be like for her. Except that we have this in common too: we gave it everything we had. And far more than we had. Time, energy, communication, money, sacrifice, support, good faith. We gave heart, soul, mind, body. And we came out of it looking a lot like...skeletons. Psychically, at least.
I'm resisting that urge to speak too quick, from my own experience instead of from patient empathy. But something surfaces, and it seems worth sharing. "What I came to, finally, was only this," I tell her. "Yes, I would so like not to have given all of that to a person so uncaring and self-absorbed. To someone who only took, while continuously asking for more and criticizing whenever I expressed a need. And then spoke and acted like it was all no more than he had a right to. Yeah, I'm still angry too. All I've found to answer it with is this: I am happy that I was the generous, kind, and open-hearted person that I appreciate me for being. That at least I was consistent with myself. And that I'm (somehow) still that person now."
She stares at me for a moment. Then she shakes her head a little bit and says, "You know, after trying to put it into words all night long, I just heard you say exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you."
And I wasn't expecting it, but those were some of the words that I needed to hear, too...
I hear her loud and clear. We have this battle in common. But she's talking about a 10-year marriage. My situation lasted a year (and that was too long, by several months). I can't imagine what forgiving must be like for her. Except that we have this in common too: we gave it everything we had. And far more than we had. Time, energy, communication, money, sacrifice, support, good faith. We gave heart, soul, mind, body. And we came out of it looking a lot like...skeletons. Psychically, at least.
I'm resisting that urge to speak too quick, from my own experience instead of from patient empathy. But something surfaces, and it seems worth sharing. "What I came to, finally, was only this," I tell her. "Yes, I would so like not to have given all of that to a person so uncaring and self-absorbed. To someone who only took, while continuously asking for more and criticizing whenever I expressed a need. And then spoke and acted like it was all no more than he had a right to. Yeah, I'm still angry too. All I've found to answer it with is this: I am happy that I was the generous, kind, and open-hearted person that I appreciate me for being. That at least I was consistent with myself. And that I'm (somehow) still that person now."
She stares at me for a moment. Then she shakes her head a little bit and says, "You know, after trying to put it into words all night long, I just heard you say exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you."
And I wasn't expecting it, but those were some of the words that I needed to hear, too...
Monday, January 14, 2013
quotes: Louise Erdrich
from a much-admired author:
"It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret."
"When it comes to God, I cherish doubt."
"When I can’t end a story, I usually find that I’ve actually written past the ending. The trick of course is to go back and decide where the last line hits."
"By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive... People sometimes ask me, Did you really have these experiences? I laugh, Are you crazy? I’d be dead. I’d be dead fifty times. I don’t write directly from my own experience so much as an emotional understanding of it."
[on her business, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis] "People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know. Little bookstores are community services, not profitable business enterprises. Books are just too inexpensive online and there are too many of them, so a physical bookstore has to offer something different. Perhaps little bookstores will attain nonprofit status. Maybe one fine day the government will subsidize them, so they can thrive as nonprofit entities. Some very clever bookstore, probably not us, is going to manage to do that and become the paradigm for the rest."
(Louise Erdrich, interviewed in Paris Review, "The Art of Fiction #208, winter 2010)
"It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret."
"When it comes to God, I cherish doubt."
"When I can’t end a story, I usually find that I’ve actually written past the ending. The trick of course is to go back and decide where the last line hits."
"By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive... People sometimes ask me, Did you really have these experiences? I laugh, Are you crazy? I’d be dead. I’d be dead fifty times. I don’t write directly from my own experience so much as an emotional understanding of it."
[on her business, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis] "People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know. Little bookstores are community services, not profitable business enterprises. Books are just too inexpensive online and there are too many of them, so a physical bookstore has to offer something different. Perhaps little bookstores will attain nonprofit status. Maybe one fine day the government will subsidize them, so they can thrive as nonprofit entities. Some very clever bookstore, probably not us, is going to manage to do that and become the paradigm for the rest."
(Louise Erdrich, interviewed in Paris Review, "The Art of Fiction #208, winter 2010)
hard to be poor
Just heard from my cousin Sam, who landed last week in Costa Rica. He's the artist-in-residence this month at a young community called Choza del Mundo, in the high-altidude jungle-forest not too far outside the country's capital. In his response to his new surroundings -- fresh food, simple and functional architecture, courteous and friendly human interactions -- he seems to be having an experience similar to mine in Mexico: just a day or two outside the overdone, hyperstressed artifice of this country, and you wake up to how much the rest of the world makes sense. Community and culture and even commerce on a human scale are surprising to a degree that's lamentable, for their being so natural.
Sam writes that while many people back home would call the circumstances that he's seeing "poverty", he recognizes, right away, that "it's really sustainability... and they realize that here." Choices are practical, efficient and within the range of needs rather than wants. And, since most people even in the cities are able to grow their own food, "it is hard to be poor".
What a fine phrase, that. Hard to be poor. While plenty of us are aware of poverty's existence and its concomitant suffering -- elsewhere and even in this country -- it has another face that far too few of us consider. As a matter entirely apart from the deep need for social and economic justice worldwide, poverty does have its chosen form. And living with less by intention is itself another country, as foreign to this dying-of-consumption society as would be a land beyond an artificially calculated political border. But many of us who have made even initial explorations into that way of being find it difficult to go back to former pursuits of citizenship among the "wealthy". And, though we still may struggle, it becomes hard to count ourselves among the poor when our eyes are opened to the wealth of possibilities that a conscious, creative and careful path presents.
I've tried several times before to write about poverty's other, chosen face; it often defies words. Or perhaps it defies us, as at-all-awakened humans, to invent and refine better words for it. Some have begun to use "simplicity" in this sense, which works at times and at others is misleading (or at least, relative). "Sustainability" certainly conveys its essence, though it may have lost some of its potency to its buzzword status. "Precarity" is one of the best terms that I know, partly because the word itself is unfamiliar. Appropriately opening windows onto a mostly-unrecognized way to see, and be.
In fact, just the effort to find an online dictionary or other source that even recognizes the word convince me that it merits a post all its own. Another day. I'm going to leave this thought-thread dangling once again. And for the moment, let go the greater human concerns, and just offer a couple of my own reasons why -- living now in a small, very contained, landless room/space -- it's pretty hard for me to be poor.
Sam writes that while many people back home would call the circumstances that he's seeing "poverty", he recognizes, right away, that "it's really sustainability... and they realize that here." Choices are practical, efficient and within the range of needs rather than wants. And, since most people even in the cities are able to grow their own food, "it is hard to be poor".
What a fine phrase, that. Hard to be poor. While plenty of us are aware of poverty's existence and its concomitant suffering -- elsewhere and even in this country -- it has another face that far too few of us consider. As a matter entirely apart from the deep need for social and economic justice worldwide, poverty does have its chosen form. And living with less by intention is itself another country, as foreign to this dying-of-consumption society as would be a land beyond an artificially calculated political border. But many of us who have made even initial explorations into that way of being find it difficult to go back to former pursuits of citizenship among the "wealthy". And, though we still may struggle, it becomes hard to count ourselves among the poor when our eyes are opened to the wealth of possibilities that a conscious, creative and careful path presents.
I've tried several times before to write about poverty's other, chosen face; it often defies words. Or perhaps it defies us, as at-all-awakened humans, to invent and refine better words for it. Some have begun to use "simplicity" in this sense, which works at times and at others is misleading (or at least, relative). "Sustainability" certainly conveys its essence, though it may have lost some of its potency to its buzzword status. "Precarity" is one of the best terms that I know, partly because the word itself is unfamiliar. Appropriately opening windows onto a mostly-unrecognized way to see, and be.
In fact, just the effort to find an online dictionary or other source that even recognizes the word convince me that it merits a post all its own. Another day. I'm going to leave this thought-thread dangling once again. And for the moment, let go the greater human concerns, and just offer a couple of my own reasons why -- living now in a small, very contained, landless room/space -- it's pretty hard for me to be poor.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
the migrant workers' church
[If dreams would write more stories for me, I could become very...happy. Well. Something to hope for. One of these days when I remember how to sleep consistently again.
As well as to the dreamtime, my thanks also go to my friends in the Catholic Worker movement, for 80 years of reinventing and revitalizing the word "church". Not a positive connotation there for many, I'm well aware. But through CWs' dedication to solidarity-through-poverty, radical personalist community, tireless labor for peace and justice, and joyfully anarchistic creativity, many of us have experienced something authentic and vibrant in this word (as well as many others in its realm of meaning), much more of life-affirming essence than a system or an institution. Or a piece of architecture.]
*******
Passing by Chiara's desk on the way to the kitchen, I catch sight of a familiar image on her monitor. There's no way I'd forget that solid shape, though I haven't seen it in a while. It's the Migrant Workers' Church. Why's my roommate looking at this? Religion's not her field. Maybe an art history project. It is an artistic edifice, though it's more than that...
I lean in for a closer look. A complex quadrilateral of rough, honey-colored sandstone fills the view, filigreed with rainbows of delicate stained-glass. The building is a living metaphor of light-suffused shelter. I always admired the balance of fragility and strength in its features. Something is making it hard to see the contours, however: squinting at the miniature image, I observe that most of its facade is covered by a scaffold. Tiny men move along the wooden frame, engaged in careful preservative restorations of the ancient stone surface. It's a live view, I realize with a little shock. I've heard about these new virtual systems, but this is the first time I've seen one in operation. They're supposed to have made some serious advances in the technology, in the last few years. Just like being there, they say. I angle my face closer to the flatscreen --hesitantly, as it almost feels like I'm going where I don't belong -- then, suddenly, I'm there. Gliding around the church's walls, diagonalling across one sturdy buttress, rising toward a view of the horizon on the other side. At first I don't want to look up: a sense midway between dread and anticipation fills me. Always been a bit wary of this technological mind-trip. But I can't resist. Knowing that the system's navigational controls are inside me now ("inside" "me", whatever both of those words mean in a virtual field), I simply think "left", and the scene swivels round, and a deep, sheltered valley opens below me. Boundaries and reservations melt away. Fearless and free, birdlike, I bank and dive over coral-rosy cliffs of volcanic tuff, into what appears to be an ancient caldera.
The church had perched right on this cliff-verge, looking as if it had been there for a century or two. But the settlement in this circular earth-hollow is obviously much older. Modest wooden houses, in various stages of quiet dilapidation, dot the slopes. Horses and cattle wander, grazing. A man plows his milpa with a donkey. Stunted trees of a brilliant green contrast with the cliffs, which curve round and shade from orange to dove-grey to lavender. Swallows wheel across the vertical faces in soft slanting light.
Clarity of vision I was expecting. But this is something a little beyond virtual. If this is only technology at work, its designers seem to have progressed far beyond the old days of GoogleEarth. I can feel a warm afternoon breeze on my skin. Breathe the scent of woodsmoke from the small houses below. The clarity of light and color is too intense for a virtual app, and too lovely. Is this really a program?
And the subtle prescience of this place's story is an altogether unexpected addition. As easily as turning to gaze from east to west across this peaceful scene, an interior shifting reveals knowledge I couldn't have possessed on my own. Peace didn't always rest on this valley. In a past not too distant, guerilla wars threatened the homes and lives of these families who quietly labored for no more than subsistence. Men wresting power by corruption and violence gave no heed to the wishes of those not living by the sword. Governments neither recognized nor cared. In their moment of greatest threat, perhaps on some plane as subtle as that of my present knowing, the people reached out for relief. And the church came. Not the "organized" institution, not a hierarchical system of authority. Not even a group of people. But a living, sentient benevolence, for purely practical reasons expressing itself in a visible structure solid enough to offer sanctuary. Perhaps an expression recognizable to those with whom it would temporarily share that space. Probably different in other instances of manifestation. Solidarity and shelter in tangible form, surrounding peace and light and refuge for those who struggle. No more, and no less.
Chiara walks into the study, and abruptly, without warning, I'm back in the room with her. Trying to slow my breath, shake off the vertigo, let eyes readjust to present limitations. "Hey, where's the Migrant Workers' Church located?" I ask her in what I hope is an offhand tone. "Oh", she replies, distracted by the contents of a file drawer. "L.A."
But it's not. Not this time, anyway.
As well as to the dreamtime, my thanks also go to my friends in the Catholic Worker movement, for 80 years of reinventing and revitalizing the word "church". Not a positive connotation there for many, I'm well aware. But through CWs' dedication to solidarity-through-poverty, radical personalist community, tireless labor for peace and justice, and joyfully anarchistic creativity, many of us have experienced something authentic and vibrant in this word (as well as many others in its realm of meaning), much more of life-affirming essence than a system or an institution. Or a piece of architecture.]
*******
Passing by Chiara's desk on the way to the kitchen, I catch sight of a familiar image on her monitor. There's no way I'd forget that solid shape, though I haven't seen it in a while. It's the Migrant Workers' Church. Why's my roommate looking at this? Religion's not her field. Maybe an art history project. It is an artistic edifice, though it's more than that...
I lean in for a closer look. A complex quadrilateral of rough, honey-colored sandstone fills the view, filigreed with rainbows of delicate stained-glass. The building is a living metaphor of light-suffused shelter. I always admired the balance of fragility and strength in its features. Something is making it hard to see the contours, however: squinting at the miniature image, I observe that most of its facade is covered by a scaffold. Tiny men move along the wooden frame, engaged in careful preservative restorations of the ancient stone surface. It's a live view, I realize with a little shock. I've heard about these new virtual systems, but this is the first time I've seen one in operation. They're supposed to have made some serious advances in the technology, in the last few years. Just like being there, they say. I angle my face closer to the flatscreen --hesitantly, as it almost feels like I'm going where I don't belong -- then, suddenly, I'm there. Gliding around the church's walls, diagonalling across one sturdy buttress, rising toward a view of the horizon on the other side. At first I don't want to look up: a sense midway between dread and anticipation fills me. Always been a bit wary of this technological mind-trip. But I can't resist. Knowing that the system's navigational controls are inside me now ("inside" "me", whatever both of those words mean in a virtual field), I simply think "left", and the scene swivels round, and a deep, sheltered valley opens below me. Boundaries and reservations melt away. Fearless and free, birdlike, I bank and dive over coral-rosy cliffs of volcanic tuff, into what appears to be an ancient caldera.
The church had perched right on this cliff-verge, looking as if it had been there for a century or two. But the settlement in this circular earth-hollow is obviously much older. Modest wooden houses, in various stages of quiet dilapidation, dot the slopes. Horses and cattle wander, grazing. A man plows his milpa with a donkey. Stunted trees of a brilliant green contrast with the cliffs, which curve round and shade from orange to dove-grey to lavender. Swallows wheel across the vertical faces in soft slanting light.
Clarity of vision I was expecting. But this is something a little beyond virtual. If this is only technology at work, its designers seem to have progressed far beyond the old days of GoogleEarth. I can feel a warm afternoon breeze on my skin. Breathe the scent of woodsmoke from the small houses below. The clarity of light and color is too intense for a virtual app, and too lovely. Is this really a program?
And the subtle prescience of this place's story is an altogether unexpected addition. As easily as turning to gaze from east to west across this peaceful scene, an interior shifting reveals knowledge I couldn't have possessed on my own. Peace didn't always rest on this valley. In a past not too distant, guerilla wars threatened the homes and lives of these families who quietly labored for no more than subsistence. Men wresting power by corruption and violence gave no heed to the wishes of those not living by the sword. Governments neither recognized nor cared. In their moment of greatest threat, perhaps on some plane as subtle as that of my present knowing, the people reached out for relief. And the church came. Not the "organized" institution, not a hierarchical system of authority. Not even a group of people. But a living, sentient benevolence, for purely practical reasons expressing itself in a visible structure solid enough to offer sanctuary. Perhaps an expression recognizable to those with whom it would temporarily share that space. Probably different in other instances of manifestation. Solidarity and shelter in tangible form, surrounding peace and light and refuge for those who struggle. No more, and no less.
Chiara walks into the study, and abruptly, without warning, I'm back in the room with her. Trying to slow my breath, shake off the vertigo, let eyes readjust to present limitations. "Hey, where's the Migrant Workers' Church located?" I ask her in what I hope is an offhand tone. "Oh", she replies, distracted by the contents of a file drawer. "L.A."
But it's not. Not this time, anyway.
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