How do you survive the survivor?

What if I stopped fighting for the trance of long-form days, where I would be uninterrupted and ambitiously absorbed in a big project? What if I gave myself over to time’s dispersion? Could I value the fractured moments as something more than ‘sub-time’ or lost time or broken time? Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?

Sometimes we falter not because the ground beneath our feet is unstable but because it’s exhausting to keep moving, to keep trying, to keep performing the same actions again and again.

Sometimes books have housed me and sometimes they have encased me.

Our faulty memories and relatively short lifespans have made us unreliable witnesses. We are unable to truly grasp how much of the natural world has been altered and destroyed by our actions because the baseline shifts over time and generations have rendered us blind. Our standards have been lowered almost unnoticeably. What we might regard as pristine nature today is a shadow of what once existed. We can’t seem to remember how things used to be.

What can you do within these narrow lines and this limited time? Who or what is stopping you?

It is possible too that I was experiencing something known as “anticipatory grief,” the mourning that occurs before a certain loss. Anticipatory. Expectatory. Trepidatory. This grief had a dampness. It did not drench or drown me, but it hung in the air like a pallid cloud, thinning but never entirely vanishing. It followed me wherever I went and gradually I grew used to looking at the world through it.

One day my sister Virginia woke up feeling wolfish. She made wolf SOUNDS and did strange things...

There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.

How does it happen? At what point is she born, the baffled, wounded adult of tomorrow? Is eleven what we react to for the rest of our lives?