The Vaster Wilds

The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit. She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust.

For there was nothing here, no angels, no harps, no gates, no fires singeing the sins back into the sinner, no hungry spirits wandering the land and standing in the cold outside the firelight of the living. There was only wind drawing itself endlessly over the dark crowns of the pines, over the face of the water, over the mountains' icy peaks, over the great wide golden stretches of the teeming land. The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.

It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world.

To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive…

For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears,

For it was a truth that mothers, having already lost their liberty when they bore children, having been tethered to the earth with this new soft tender body they must now protect forever, were the ones who understood the delicate balance between the price of freedom and the price of their children's lives.

Eden would overtake the world and the mistake of man would be forgot.

For, if a bear could feel awe, then a bear could certainly know god.

Perhaps the eternal chain of being was not a chain at all, but a ring, one life not ending where the other begins but all souls overlapping.

For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men.

For what woman has not, walking in the dark of the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from his hidden place, and felt the same chills chasing over her skin, and quickened her steps to get away.

No, she said, for the blight of the english will come to this remoteness as well. It will spread into this land and infect this land and devour the people who were here first; it will slaughter them, diminish them. The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left, then they will eat themselves.

To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive, she understood. And if she could in fact rouse herself to healing, if she could chase away the vulture of death, she would not choose this life that was shown to her, though the beauties of the world were without limit and the grace given to encounter more of them would have been an astonishing gift. Though there was satisfaction in the work of her body and her hands, though mere survival was a triumph, she understood now that the long loneliness of such a life she would never choose for herself.

They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.

Surely it must be smaller than my own far greater country across the waters, where each field is so thick with legend and myth and ancient battles that one step is not merely in space, unlike in this new world, but also through layers of time. Here there is nothing, only land, all the earth and mountains and trees remain innocent of story. This place is itself a sheet of parchment yet to be written upon,

For, inches beyond this face of hers and in the profoundest sufferings of her body, the world went on in its grand and renewing and wholly indifferent beauty.

But now she sensed the earth under her in its spin and knew herself to be a piece of it, necessary and large enough. For a long moment, she saw herself lying in the very center of the palm of god’s hand, and the night was made of god’s fingers curved to protect her against the blaze of eternity. And the stars and the moon were the space shining within.

The forest was not dark, because darkness has nothing to do with the forest—the forest is made of life, of light—but the trees moved with wind and subtle creatures.

She had once believed that in the deepest reaches of everything was a nothing where men had planted god; but now she knew that deeper within that nothing was something else, something made of light and heat. It was this light and heat that endured, that was everlasting. At the center was not nothing, no. Out of the light and the heat all goodness poured.

And if a bear could know god in his own bear way, then a bear had a soul, and she could not see how it was that man could feel it was in his right to slaughter such beasts, for in slaughtering the bear’s body, man was also slaughtering the beast’s soul, which also yearned toward god.

Yes, she thought, this is right. Old carrion bird, bringing your reek of death to me.

And Eden would overtake the world and the mistake of man would be forgot.

And as she ran she prayed in her soul: O god, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up for the godly, grant me in all my doubts and uncertainties the grace to ask what thou wouldst have me do that the spirit of wisdom may save me from all false choices and that in thy light I may see light and in thy straight path may not stumble. She

A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past. It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.

Against the resistance of other minds, one's thoughts are pulled out of their comfortable shapes, and true thinking begins.