Across the Swamp
—Olav Hauge

It is the roots from all the trees that have died
out here, that’s how you can walk
safely over the soft places.
Roots like these keep their firmness, it’s possible
they’ve lain here centuries.
And there is still some dark demains
of them under the moss.
They are still in the world and hold
you up so you can make it over.
And when you push out into the mountain lake, high
up, you feel how the memory
of that cold person
who drowned himself here once
helps hold up your frail boat.
He, really crazy, entrusted his life
to water and eternity.

The Weekly Insight from the Oracles for May 3, 2021 is live on my Patreon!

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The Monthly Overview from the Oracles for May 2021 is live on my Patreon! This is a Patrons-only feature: three cards and three runes to give you a preview of the month ahead.

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I needed a break from work on Monday, and pulled the pile of “stuff to process” that has been sitting on the corner of my desk just a bit too long. There are no time-sensitive documents or essential tasks in this pile; rather, it’s the accumulation of things I’ve read or seen that I want to record in some way, whether it’s the name of a book to add to my library, an interesting item to keep handy for book ideas, or something to add to my clippings box. (Yes, I still keep a box of clippings from the newspaper and other print media.)

In August 2020, the San Francisco Chronicle did a set of special supplements on the pandemic, and in the August 30 edition was a short fiction piece, “The Spectrum Generation” by Carolina De Robertis. She frames it as a letter from a college student to his professor, written in the year 2030, about the assigned topic of “How the COVID Era Shaped Your Life”.

She imagines the letter writer as a science major who is having trouble fitting the assignment into the standard five-paragraph essay. The student claims not to be a writer, but “I was raised by an English teacher”, and the writing is wonderfully descriptive of the student’s experiences as a child during the pandemic.

What spoke to me most was this quote:

“Maybe that’s what I learned from TCE: we don’t have to fear change. This isn’t some dystopian future where all is lost. Those old narratives are so lazy. If all is lost, you can just throw up your hands in despair, and then what? Look at the climate crisis. We can’t afford those old despair stories anymore.
The more complicated truth takes all of where we are, and tries to see it clearly. The more complicated truth is that I may be part of a different generation, but I’m also my grandma’s grandson, and we all have to pick up where past generations left off and carry the work forward.”

I encourage you to read it in full; it’s a one page story, and well worth the time.

Overlooking the Cortile
—David St. John

for T

Late winter yet we stood at the open window
Its green wood shutters pushed back like wings
Against the walls of the ancient building
We stood at the aperture of the narrow room
Looking down onto the fountain in the cortile
Her old room now mine & she said nothing
Of the year she’d slept here
Knowing the Russian painter she loved
Was out somewhere on the streets of Rome
Walking with his Contessa every evening at dusk
As the grief of a rossignol ran down the stones of
The faded wall just outside her window & along the ivy
Seeping slowly as water from the lips of Orpheus
& those liquid sobs of a Roman nightingale