The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.
She smiles at me with what feels like her whole self, and I can only think of it as…love.
I shovelled the compost and spread it, shovelled and spread, preparing the soil and waiting for things to make sense. Tried to attend, very softly and quietly, which is the closest I can get to prayer.
The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.
Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.
from NYT review:
Distance from the world is no antidote to the narrator’s despair; it merely gives her room to acknowledge it. She’s forlorn about her parents’ deaths more than 30 years ago; about her dissolving marriage; about her increasing disillusionment with her Threatened Species Rescue Center. “At every step of my every attempt I have only worsened the destruction,” she decides. “Every email, meeting, press release, conference, protest. Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat. … Whereas staying still, suspended in time like these women, does the opposite. They are doing no harm.”
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