So What Is Wild? What Is Wilderness?

To Sew Is To Pray. Men Don't Understand This. They See The Whole But They Don't See The Stitches. They Don't See The Speech Of The Creator In The Work Of The Needle. We Mend. We Women Turn Things Inside Out And Set Things Right. We Salvage What We Can Of Human Garments And Piece The Rest Into Blankets. Sometimes Our Stitches Stutter And Slow. Only A Woman's Eyes Can Tell. Other Times, The Tension In The Stitches Might Be Too Tight Because Of Tears, But Only We Know What Emotion Went Into The Making. Only Women Can Hear The Prayer.

At Times The Whole Sky Was Ringed In Shooting Points And Puckers Of Light Gathering And Falling, Pulsing, Fading, Rhythmical As Breathing. All Of A Piece. As If The Sky Were A Pattern Of Nerves And Our Thought And Memories Traveled Across It. As If The Sky Were One Gigantic Memory For Us All.

To Sew Is To Pray. Men Don't Understand This. They See The Whole But They Don't See The Stitches. They Don't See The Speech Of The Creator In The Work Of The Needle.

We Have These Earthly Bodies. We Don't Know What They Want. Half The Time, We Pretend They Are Under Our Mental Thumb, But That Is The Illusion Of The Healthy And The Protected. Of Sedate Lovers. For The Body Has Emotions It Conceives And Carries Through Without Concern For Anyone Or Anything Else. Love Is One Of Those, I Guess. Going Back To Something Very Old Knit Into The Brain As We Were Growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

Life Will Break You. Nobody Can Protect You From That.