Meghan Tonjes Instagram – this book felt like something you’d read aloud, passed back and forth between you and a lover, during a cabin weekend
some notable passages:
The nights are cool now. The ground is glistening, and the night is glistening too, just beginning to lighten. With every step, I leave footprints in the dew. It is early, and chill. Creatures of the diurnal world are still seeping, and creatures of the nocturnal world are looking for a safe place to sleep.
I have abandoned all hope of sleeping and have crept outside to watch the bumblebees sleep instead. As night comes on, they crawl into the balsam flowers, those colorful bells of red and purple and pink. I love to see them sheltering from the rain beneath a giant canna leaf, but I especially love to see them sleep, their fuzzy bumblebutts poking out of the blossoms. It comforts me to know my garden is full of sleeping bees.
I brush the edge of a flower-barely touching it, an innocent accident—but the bee is angry, unforgiving. She backs out of her bed and rears back. She waves her bumblebee arms and buzzes at me.
I squat to look at her, careful not to touch, but she does not trust me.
She knows I belong to the lumbering kind, the true bumbling trouble at the heart of the world.
•
Now that the leaves have dropped from the hardwood trees and the fallen needles have made a golden ring beneath the pines; now that the migrating songbirds have passed us in the night, and the park turtles have hidden themselves in their loamy chambers, and the rattlesnakes on the bluff have found the crevices in the rock where they will sleep through the cold; now that the exaltation of autumn is gone for another year, and the darkness is visibly deeper with every passing afternoon— now is when I begin to yearn for the solstice. I am yearning for the light.
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The world does not proceed according to our plans. The world is an old dog, following us around the kitchen with its eyes.
The world understands us. We understand nothing, control less.
• | Posted on 04/May/2024 09:54:01
