Mutterings

Like all moments (or hours) in front of a digital screen, I start one place and end up somewhere I never expected to be. It appears to be reshaping my understanding of consciousness and concentration. Skimming through reams of information appears to me like a description of the Bardo state in the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- the mind flitting from one nano-second to the next....endlessly. I always come away feeling a bit spent and trying to gather my focus again. On the other hand the part of it I love is standing on this high divide and scanning the great distance for the pieces I didn't know existed, like discovering something kindred...or part of a soul I recognize.

It occured again when I searched Craig Lesley in Novelist and ended up with Gretel Ehrlich. You start out on some Indian Reservation in the Northwest, maybe the Yakima or Colville with troubling stories of life there, and you end up reading the Kirkus review, with the quote "greed-fed malfeasance" about melting ice and polar cold. I keep running across Ehrlich and her focus on the brittle, cold world and the piece of her that is haunted by snow -- its place in the world -- its place in the psyche. For some reason I understand that. Norman McLean may be haunted by waters, but I, like Gretel, am haunted by winter. I wasn't thinking about my relationship to all things frozen this morning, but here I am.

As you can see Novelist is about where searches end up. Did you find the right book? Did you find out that your molecules had been rearranged unexpectedly? And what does that do to my consciousness?

By the way, Novelist is going to be my savior when I get the dreaded question, "What's the third book in the series?"