Wenche Disington

WHEN THE ROSES SPEAK, I PAY ATTENTION

«As long as we are able to
be extravagant we will be
hugely and damply
extravagant. Then we will drop
foil by foil to the ground. This
is our unalterable task, and we do it
joyfully.»

And they went on. «Listen,
the heart-shackles are not, as you think,
death, illness, pain,
unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,
selfishness.»

Their fragrance all the while rising
from their blind bodies, making me
spin with joy.

Mary Oliver, fra Thirst, 2006

«I don`t want to be a tree, I want to be it`s meaning»

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born in Lyons in 1900. He joined the French army in 1921, and that’s where he flew his first plane. He left the military five years later and began flying airmail routes into the Sahara Desert, eventually becoming the director of a remote airfield in Rio de Oro. Living conditions were Spartan, but he said, «I have never loved my house more than when I lived in the desert.» He wrote his first novel, Southern Mail (1929), in the Sahara and never lost his love for the desert.

In 1929, he moved to South America to fly the mail through the Andes, and he later returned to carry the post between Casablanca and Port-Étienne. He worked as a test pilot and a journalist throughout the 1930s, and survived several plane crashes. He also got married in 1931, to Consuelo Gómez Carrillo. She wrote of him in her memoir, «He wasn’t like other people, but like a child or an angel who has fallen down from the sky.»

He rejoined the French army upon the outbreak of World War II, but when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to the United States, hoping to serve the U.S. forces as a fighter pilot. He was turned down because of his age, and, homesick and discouraged, he began his best-known book, The Little Prince (1943). The following year, he returned to North Africa to fly a warplane for France. He took off on a mission on July 31, 1944, and was never heard from again.

The ancient Incan citadel of Machu Picchu was rediscovered by an American archaeologist  in 1911. Perched on the eastern slope of the Peruvian Andes, the complex was built about 500 years ago, at the height of the Inca Empire. The city is made up of about 200 buildings, including temples, houses, and baths, and it’s roughly divided into an agricultural sector and an urban sector. Its many levels are connected by 3,000 steps, and there are sophisticated irrigation channels and fountains to distribute water.

One secret to the site’s preservation is its terrace system. The terraces provided ample places to grow crops, and they also helped the city cope with the heavy annual rainfall by providing a drainage system. The bottom layer of each terrace consisted of the stone bits that were chipped away during construction of the buildings. On top of that layer were smaller stone chips, and sand, and then topsoil. Excess water could drain down through these layers and be channeled away; without the terraces, mudslides would have carried Machu Picchu down the mountain long ago. The terraces also provide some protection against invasion, as their structure slows down any enemy’s progress toward the mountaintop.

It’s believed that Machu Picchu was built to be a resort or estate for Incan nobility, although it may also have been a religious site. It’s not clear why the Incans left, though, because there’s no evidence that Spanish conquerors ever found the site.

The so-called lost city was never lost to the locals, but Bingham was one of the first outsiders to see it. And it’s certainly no secret these days — hundreds of thousands of people visit Machu Picchu every year. It’s one of the largest tourist attractions in South America, and all the traffic and nearby construction is taking a toll on the site.

If there be light, then there is darkness.

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

«A word is dead when it is said, someone say. I say, it just begins to live that day.»

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

Leo Tolstoy set off on a pilgrimage to the Optina-Pustyn monastery.

He was 52 years old, and his two greatest novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), were behind him. He had found himself in a crisis—he was famous, had a family and land and money, but it all seemed empty. He was unable to write, had trouble sleeping, contemplated suicide. He read the great philosophers, but found holes in all of their arguments. He was amazed that the majority of ordinary Russians managed to keep themselves going every day, and he finally decided that it must be their faith. From there, it was a short time until Tolstoy took a walk in the woods and found God. He wrote: «At the thought of God, happy waves of life welled up inside me. Everything came alive, took on meaning. The moment I thought I knew God, I lived. But the moment I forgot him, the moment I stopped believing, I also stopped living.«