The Farming of Bones

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

I wish I could've done more for her, but some sorrows were simply too individual to share.

Que diga amor? Love? Hate? Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird's call, of a child's secret thoughts in her mother's womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman's breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries.

Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before.

Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.

Two mountains can never meet but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall

Our fatigue limited our desire to talk. Besides, each person's story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.

For so long this had been my life, but it was all in the past. Now we all had to try and find the future.

Jephthah called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, 'Let me cross over,' the men of Gilead asked him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he replied, 'No,' they said, 'All right, say Shibboleth.' If he said, 'Sibboleth,' because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Fourty-thousand were killed at the time. - Judges 12:4-6

It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.

At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it's never been an infant's whimper, a boy's whisper, a young man's mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me.

I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.

Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebatstien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person. At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold, from the house where they were born to the hill where they wanted to be buried. It was their way of returning home, with you as a witness or as someone to bring them back to the present...

Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.