Rebecca Solnit

Here’s one (not particularly recommended) way to approach a holiday meal: a couple of years ago, I had a harvest lunch/Thanksgiving meal at my daughter’s nice elementary school. Afterward, an older student read a story aloud about, naturally, the original Thanksgiving. At the end, the child read the last page, an addendum likely tacked on, of historic American dates. That’s when I should have just quietly walked out. From there on, as the girl read in her clear, sweet voice, in that sunny room filled with such decent and well-meaning people, I sat there brooding, History is a brutal business.

And yet.

Last night, the too-warm winds of this too-warm November blowing grit in our eyes and mouths, my daughters and brother and I stood beneath the full moon in her radiant splendor. The moonlight flowed so rich and bright that it pooled in reflections around the house: in a pile of windows, a car’s hubcap, the neighbors’ house distantly through the leafless forest.

At times, I remind myself to assess my strengths, get a read on my bearings. There’s no quibbling history is a nasty and bloody story, but this same ethereal moon outdistances the human saga, this heavenly body present for those famous Pilgrims, and long, long, long before that, too.

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

– Rebecca Solnit

Montpelier, Vermont/photo by Molly S.

This November morning, stepping out on the porch in the early light, the air was balmy, that tender place of a nascent day. In the dew on the car’s back window, my younger daughter rubbed a five-pointed figure. So I can look out through a star, she told me.

From the clear day on our hillside, we drove down into the thick fog along the Lamoille River, and then up through the Woodbury gulch, where the clouds thinned and abruptly ceased. When we got to school, she gathered her things, then stood for a moment outside the car, looking at the window where the star had disappeared, leaving no trace.

She tipped her head to one side and pressed her hand over the glass. I asked her name.

She shrugged and laughed, then went into school to begin her day. Overhead, a heron winged its silent way to the wetlands.

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason — its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

— Rebecca Solnit

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Thanks and All That

Child’s Starry Point of View