Photo Courtesy - @booksmyquerencia

photo courtesy - @booksmyquerencia

August 25, 2024

When they say life must go on, I wonder what kind of life they mean. It’s not life they’re living; it’s a show—a sartorial parade, a spectacle for the people, of the people, by the people. A show of money, of fleeting interests, of agendas dressed in fine fabrics. Is this what they call life, or is it just a rat parade, where we’re all racing towards an unseen never-ending finish line?

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Between takeoff and landing, we are each suspended in animation—a pause between the chapters of our lives. When I look out at the world, it's reduced to a flat projection, where mountain ranges are merely wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories unfold beneath us. Blackberries ripen under the August sun, a woman hesitates at her doorway with a suitcase in hand, a letter is opened, and a surprising photograph slides out, capturing a moment of pure, unfiltered truth.

But we’re moving too fast, too far away; all the stories escape us, save for our own.As I turn away from the window, those stories recede, disappearing into the two-dimensional map of green and brown below. They vanish like a trout into the shade of an overhanging bank, leaving us staring at the surface of the water, questioning if we ever saw them at all ???

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Maram al-Massri, from A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor (trans. Khaled Mattawa) [ID'd]

Alex Dimitrov, from Love and Other Poems; “Suddenly, Summer”

Vermillion hues of my roots

— Anaïs Nin, from The Voice