Welcome to Wildfrolics

Magical meanderings of forest, desert, and shore,
with Superball the Storyteller


A small aquamarine crystal—tip blazing with a blinding little ball of reflected sunlight—propped up at the bottom of the screen of a battered laptop

Adventures begin below. . . .


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The Frolics

The healing of this planet is not a matter of humanity stepping out, creating a separate human realm, and leaving nature untouched. It will not come through minimizing our impact; it will come through changing the nature of our impact. It will come through a different kind of participation with nature, one where humanity returns to being an extension of, and not an exception to, ecology.

—Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

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NOTE: A frolic is in progress. Unless you wish to see its rough, incomplete stage (below), you can choose from these three recently finished frolics or scroll to the complete list at the bottom of the page.




13 November 2024

Jewelry, tides, language:

things that shine.
What is description, after all,
but encoded desire?

And if we say
the marsh, if we forge
terms for it, then isn’t it

contained in us
a little,
the brightness?

—Mark Doty, “Description”

The fall is upon us.


A large dead black wasp, with a human pointer-finger included for scale, wedged among dead leaves and redwood fronds in a corner of some construct of gray metal and plastic

Then, “negotiation,” a phase where the suspended interregnum of place and identity causes reality to clamp down and cultural barriers to arise, is described well by the Spanish language term zozobra, an anxious inability to be at home in the world. . . . This phase also produces demoralisation, a psycho-spiritual crisis associated with the breakdown of one’s cognitive map, where the assumptions that grounded you before lose all credibility, leaving you utterly confused.

—Jessica Buchleitner, Return of the Descendants

While banging down the composting toilet bucket to settle it, I encounter the first scorpion I’ve ever seen at the Tenterraces. The poor creature, stunned, had been nestled up to the bucket—and eventually departs for more scorpion-friendly terrain.


I walked the hills, the buzzing meadows of thyme and lilac, and set my footprints across the yellow beaches. I searched out every cove and grotto, found the gentle bays, the harbor safe for ships. I heard the wolves howl, and the frogs cry from their mud. I stroked the glossy brown scorpions who braved me with their tails. Their poison was barely a pinch. I was drunk, as the wine and nectar in my father’s halls had never made me.

. . . A thousand thousand times, I had crossed Aiaia’s slopes. The poplars, black and white, lacing their bare arms. The cornels and apple trees with fallen fruits still shriveling on the ground. The fennel tall as my waist, the sea rocks white with drying salt. Overhead, the skimming cormorants called to the waves. Mortals like to name such natural wonders changeless, eternal, but the island was always changing, that was the truth, flowing endlessly through its generations.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


At the end of a broken silver chain, a cameo pendant with a black background and the side profile of an elegant skull with a coiffed head of hair

Not sure if you went that way, you would have had to go around one of those angled and grounded strands of snarl. I try not to judge. Just really hard when I see that stuff. You know. It won’t always be there.

—Facet 44, in a text to me (shared with permission)


A mostly submerged, rusted green metal boat at the shore of a wide, sparkling blue sea with peaceful white waves

This boat’s pickled in salt,
but preserved, I think,
by sheer persistence;
some things have such a will
to be themselves
they don’t take to decay,
even wave-beaten and scoured
by seekers of salvage
and souvenir. I love this evidence.
Ghost, it is more stubborn
than live things. Ruin,
it lasts, though the bay’s
huge indifference laves what might,
should, at any moment, cave in,
dissolve—what must, in any tempest,
scatter the shore in unrecognizable
fragments. It doesn’t, hasn’t,
I want to say won’t:
something must hold,
some chambered wreck
must fill and empty daily,
seawater pouring like the future
—I need this evidence—
into the hulk which admits
and releases and keeps
its grip on the shore.
—Mark Doty, “Wreck”


As seen from farther up the beach—with the ocean to the right—the boat, more exposed now, beyond which is an upright driftwood stump like a fat white spider on the sand, pointing with one of its root “legs” toward the boat and toward a line of footprints that continues out of frame, close to the waves

🐵❤️✨

That’s some brown monkey magic right there in the form of ferrous deterioration. ;-)

—Facet 44, in a text to me (shared with permission)

What has gone before is getting processed.


Fox droppings with dead grasses in them, on a weathered wooden deck

I get into a shower after stepping on a slug, who is unhappy but I think will be okay.


None of this has been anyone’s fault. Please remember that for your own sweet self. We are all innocent we don’t have to prove anything to anyone.

—Facet 44, in a text to me (shared with permission)

As the water falls over me, I close my eyes and find myself, soul-weary, at my future cottage by the sea, where I sink into the earth of the garden out back and curl up to rest there. My old cat Diego comes and puts his paw on my hand.


I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


A brilliant orange seastar among wet, colorful beach-pebbles

We just try to blend the cultures. I’m not trying to sit here and say, “Oh, you have to pay attention to Native people, and we matter more than you.” Just know a Native. Let’s start with that.

—Joe San Diego, quoted in “Native Arts Fest Debuts in Windsor,” The Press Democrat, May 12, 2024

After the shower, I sit in the sun, integrating That with This, in a questioning space with no answers forthcoming.


At last, I felt the shade close over me, and I curled up on the moss. It had rained a little, and the damp earth was sweet against me. So many times I had imagined lying there with Glaucos, but whatever tears might have been in me for that lost dream had been parched away.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


A firepit of cinderblocks, bricks, and stones, surrounded by greenery, empty of all but black and bluish-white ash

A sense of heaviness and gloom descends, even in beautiful surroundings.



A sprig of whitish-blue forget-me-nots peeking around the corner of an outdoor easy-chair, from the perspective of a human whose bare foot rests on the chair’s bare-foam cushion

What do we know of flowers? Of their wiliness and brilliance born of a ferocious will to live? Of their ability to extract what they need to survive over their fleeting lives, only so it can be given away?

—Richard J. Nevle, The Paradise Notebooks


Just when you thought something was dead: a branch of brilliant green Solomon’s seal with a row of dangling green-white flowers, arching from a pot over a folding lawn chair in a forest clearing

This was the dream that Wally told me:
I was in the tunnel, he said,

and there really was a light at the end,
and a great being standing in the light.

—Mark Doty, “Atlantis”

Then I get a caterpillar coming out of my sleeve.


A tiny one emerging from the loose cuff of a sweatshirt into sunlight

November watches as Sei reaches into her kimono and draws out an enormous, waterlogged book. She opens it at a seaweed bookmark and begins to read.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

Make a wish.


An eyebrow hair—the thick end dark, the tapered end light, in a similar orientation to the Solomon’s seal in photo above—held up on a fingertip over a page of a book with the following words showing: me, fitted stone, below stretched, sea, rest that drew, and olive, the green, shook, my life, shore, and I felt the sudden, a pond

“. . . I read a book, and I think it had my future written in it. But I am afraid. And I am so tired. . . .”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

I thought I would have things figured out by now, but flashes of clarity come when they come.


“. . . We will come and get you, if you cannot come to us, and carry you into the sun. I promise.”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


With grass growing in cracks, a paved path on a steep green hillside, terminating at an open, rectangular chunk of fence that appears to have nothing beyond but wide-open, sunlit sea


A trail leading through green grass to a square opening, similar to the one above, in a weathered gray picket fence, beyond which is a constellation of white calla lilies and a weathered building almost out of frame and obscured by a hydrangea bush

Raven calls for our attention (and in fact is also calling to the me who writes this).


Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


Two ravens in blue sky in the distance, over assorted trees and other greenery, with one tall, many-trunked tree particularly prominent

Let’s go for a walk, shall we?



A raven perched on a wooden fencepost by a wooden gate on a grassy green hillside, with the roof of a house showing just beyond


The raven leading the way up the trail beyond the gate


The raven a little farther along but closer, as we have gone through the gate and are following

. . . The inviolability of one soul can keep the whole of hell outside the gates of the city she chooses as her own.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


A city of flowers like pink puffballs on the tops of long, bare stalks, partially obscuring a natural, squarish shape beyond, with one flower very close and out of focus in the foreground, like a vanguard

I have things to show you.



The cracked asphalt path shown before, curving toward the sunlit sea

Lock 19, where the Albumen dips downstream, following a course toward the center of the city, is normally staffed by a bored old mariner, picking his teeth with baleen and writing secret shanties about the beauty of land, the tilling of soil, the baking of bread.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest


The the calla lilies from before, closer to the structure, which is revealed to be an empty, dilapidated seaside shack with grasses growing on it

There’s a redwood grove I know, where Natives will be dancing.



A raven—who you could swear has a demeanor of invitation—on a bare, treetop branch against blue sky, seen through an opening in the tree’s foliage


The trunk of a massive redwood with limbs radiating from it as from the body of a whirling dancer or a thousand-legged spider

Of course we proceed—or I do, at least.


What else is there to do? So slowly, one handful of dirt at a time, we plant, we feebly attempt to heal our own little broken worlds.

The things that happen in our lives, my friends, may be horrific. Unimaginably dark. But then, things settle; there is compost.

—Amanda Palmer, “Happy Friday Night, All. Say Hello, and Grow, Grow, Grow.”

We always have a choice.


I shook his hand with the vague sensation of having met him before.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

Soon, with not even a hint of a breeze, a big branch crashes down in the middle distance.


Not this one, but it gives you the idea: a huge, freshly fallen bay laurel branch, with a smaller branch bent from it like the crumpled arm of someone fallen

(In fact a big branch fell—without a breeze, right after a raven’s call—from a redwood before I sat down to write just now.)


The gaping hole in the colossal tree from which the branch fell

As we near the Forest Theater, a stick falls right next to us.


A luminous dead bluish-white moth on a wide dusty woodland trail near deer hoofprints and a stick, with the dust color echoing that of the chair cushion in the photo above, and the moth reminiscent of the white foot and the forget-me-nots

Then, just before the dance, a little piece of redwood frond alights in the center of my hairline. As the dance is underway, a tiny flake of a bud’s coating settles in the center of my chest.

So it’s a progression from distant and alarming to intimate and gentle.



In a shallow woodland pool through which rays of sunlight filter to the quiet silt bottom, a reflection of tall trees in a sky the blue of forget-me-nots and of white butterflies in shadow

Reflect on ways to harness your hunger and longing for collective good . . . .

—Ancestral Medicine

Raven magic, though tricksy, can be affectionate.



A raven flying over a river by a little open-air wine bar where a two-person band is playing


The raven closer up, high in the center of nothing but blue sky


Two ravens cavorting in a blue sky, high above green treetops

The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. . . . We are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous.

—Maria Popova, The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain


A speck of raven almost centered in an open blue sky over deep blue ocean and wide green hills

He scanned the sea, however, with such determination that he plumbed the depths of his sadness and finally depleted it.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


A narrow, forking fairytale trail past a thistle through an expanse of beautiful but invasive ice plant with white flowers, toward a rock formation like a miniature gray mountain


With the ocean to the left in the distance, a raven flying over huge, rock-dotted green hills as if leading toward a snaking road up the farthest hill


A couple of distant white human-shaped specks trekking one after the other up a steep green hillside

. . . Trust in our luck that we are here on earth at all, that we have this moment at all. . . . In the long run, the revelation of beauty is not a matter of chance: it is the centermost surety in life.

. . . We might, for a brief spell of years, have the luck to find a home here by following the beauty that beckons us.

—Steven Nightingale, The Paradise Notebooks


A lucky green grasshopper on the dust of a pebbly trail, ready to jump

Externally he was stone, but as the months went by something elemental inside him softened, opened, and something budded. The first symptom was compassion, an emotion unknown to him, something he had never received or had occasion to practice. Something was growing beneath the hardness and silence, something akin to a boundless affection for others, something that surprised him more than any of the changes he had undergone.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


A large, egglike stone in the sunlit sand of a cave mouth

But I liked it, as if his words were a secret. A thing that looked like a stone, but inside was a seed.

—Madeline Miller, Circe


The ashen firepit from before, now shown with the Sun beaming rays down through trees as if in blessing or as if having hatched from the ashes, casting a faint rainbow lens-flare


A cluster of redwoods whose hundreds of arms reach with rays of sunlight toward a sapling and a human, who is the same height as the sapling and is gazing upward


On a beach, a small fort of stones and twisted driftwood sticks, with the human beyond, leaning over to examine something in the sand

“And what is in that shell? A snail?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Air.”

“Those are not the same,” he said. “Nothing is empty void, while air is what fills all else. It is breath and life and spirit, the words we speak.”

—Madeline Miller, Circe


In a green meadow, a tiny cabin with a rusting tin roof, seen between two of the multiple trunks of a small, bushlike tree—as if the stone fort in the previous photo has become the cabin, and the driftwood sticks have become the tree

Also the orange orchidlike creatures are beginning to bloom after sudden precipitation and the greening, so sudden. Almost instantaneous.

—Facet 44, in a text to me (shared with permission)


An orange-red paintbrush flower and a whitish-blue pussy-ear flower soaking in the sun next to each other at the edge of a rock in an open, grassy area with a conifer beyond


Sea lions with heads curved around—looking in all directions as if not sure where the Sun is—at the edge of a large rock in a blue-gray sea under a blue-gray sky

And the people said, Come with us,

we’re going dancing. And they seemed so glad
to be going, and so glad to have me

join them, but I said,
I’m not ready yet. I didn’t know what to do,

—Mark Doty, “Atlantis”


The same sea lions, with many of them now out in the water with heads poking up like shark fins


One sea lion swimming close to the base of the rock, perhaps wanting to join the others but unsure how

The wind picks up too much—rushes. A snag says, Turn back. It’s not time yet. Parts of you must die a little more.


At a headland over an oceanscape, a three-armed snag with the main arm pointing left

Here be dragons.


At the same general location, a fallen, twisted dead tree—similar in color and curves to the sea lions above—that looks like a dragon

Not that there’s anything wrong with dragons, if you’re ever ready for a wild ride.



The handknit strap of a shoulder bag half-obscuring the cover of an early edition of the children’s book Serendipity (by Stephen Cosgrove), so that the cute, fuchsia-colored water-dragon on the cover appears to be peeking shyly around the strap

For now, we go back.


A thin trail snaking across a green hilltop among native wildflowers, with a river beyond, and the ocean to the right beyond that

To everything there is a fucking season.

A time to feel, a time to process, and a time to tell the truth. A time to rage about injustice, a time to take care of your kid, a time to take care of yourself, a time to go out and protest, a time to take a nap.

. . . To remember that the stories will unfold as they need to. . . . To remember that living in—and savoring—the moment is more important than telling the story of that moment.

—Amanda Palmer, “The State of All Things, Birthday Edition: April 2024”

Some people get fed along the way.


In a green pasture with the ocean beyond, two paint horses looking curiously over a flimsy barbed-wire fence with thicker green grass on this side, which has been disturbed as if by a human feeding some of the grass to the horses

Time overlaps itself.



On a table in darkness, a lit candle-lantern casting shadows from a small unicorn-head in silhouette, a deer antler, a tobacco pipe, an abalone shell, a walnut shell, a white bobble, a dark feather, and a rock with “Love” etched into it

The you there and here go wherever you go and do whatever you do in your own space and time.


Across the expanse ice plant shown before, a single red-hot-poker flower peeks from behind a low rock formation into the sky above a blue-ocean horizon line

The me who is ever adventuring goes home to her Tenterraces and the tent called Der Wilderbunker.


A tarp-style carport enclosure nestled among trees and undergrowth, the front rolled up but hung with two blankets (one blue and mottled white, one white and printed with cats), in front of which, seen from the back—gazing downslope—is a scarecat made, in hopes of deterring mountain lions, from a ladder and a big hoodie

“Yeah. I admit, I always kind of keep my eyes open for a girl with tigers, but even if it were true, it would’ve happened so long ago that I suppose that’s pretty stupid.”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

Once I’m settled in Der Wilderbunker with a cup of tea or a can of matë, a little bird flies in, perches on a stick in a bucket of twigs (slated to feed the little camp stove I call the Phoenix), flies to the rear peak of Der Wilderbunker—twittering away, perhaps eating spiders—and then flies to the front peak before circling my ancestor altar and flying out.


They lived on the periphery of current events. All ages of history co-exist in this immoderate geography. While in the capital entrepreneurs conduct business affairs by telephone with associates in other cities on the globe, there are regions in the Andes where standards of human behavior are those introduced five centures earlier by the Spanish conquistadors, and in some jungle villages men roam naked through the jungle, like their ancestors in the Stone Age. It was a decade that had witnessed great upheavals and marvelous discoveries, but for many it was no different from previous times.

. . . Visitors came from nearby towns, and when someone with a portable radio interrupted, shouting that the General had fled and mobs were breaking into the prisons and butchering secret agents, people yelled at him to shut up, he was upsetting the gamecocks. The only person to give up his place was the chief of police, who left reluctantly to go to his office to communicate with his superiors in the capital and receive instructions. He returned a couple of hours later, saying that the whole damn thing was a tempest in a teapot; the government had fallen, but nothing had changed. So start up the music and dancing, and give me another beer . . . .

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

From there, I go on to become the me writing to you now from the deck of her absent friend’s off-grid woodland tiny home, where I entertain and am entertained by chickadees eating from a pile of sunflower seeds.


It was a soft and slightly rainy Wednesday, not very different from others in my life, but I treasure that Wednesday as a special day, one that belonged only to me. . . . I poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the typewriter. I took a clean white piece of paper—like a sheet freshly ironed for making love—and rolled it into the carriage. Then I felt something odd, like a pleasant tickling in my bones, a breeze blowing through the network of veins beneath my skin. I believed that that page had been waiting for me for more than twenty years, that I had lived only for that instant . . . . I could see an order to the stories stored in my genetic memory since before my birth, and the many others I had been writing for years in my notebooks.

. . . I followed my own rhythm, ignoring the recommendations I had received: scripts are organized into two columns; each episode has twenty-five scenes; be careful, because scene changes are very expensive and the actors get confused if the speeches are too long; every key sentence must be repeated three times, and keep the plot simple; begin from the premise that your audience is composed of morons. A stack of pages grew on the table, spattered with notes, corrections, hieroglyphics, and coffee stains: but as soon as I had begun dusting off memories and weaving destinies, I saw that I did not know where I was going, or what the resolution would be—if there was one.

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

What do the little birds tell us?


In the silence between the notes, there is infinite possibility.

—Alice Coltrane

What do the bigger birds tell us?


A flock of brown pelicans in a rough V formation in a deep blue sky with white Sun rays and the white double-arc of a lens flare


A flock of pelicans flying past the city of sea lions basking on rocks

Listen to the waves, to the leaves, to the wind, to the insects in the sink and on the walls. They know.

—Amanda Palmer, “ ‘Whakenewha’ with Aurelia Torkington @ Waiheke Musical Museum, May 2022”


The human propping himself on rocks at the edge of the sea, dunking his head into the water


Hovering dragonflies mating above the green surface vegetation of a pond

Once you have experienced secure attachment, the idea of being “replaced” becomes absurdly laughable.

—Clementine Morrigan, “Loving with Open Hands: On Polyamory”

An expectant, open patience flows through everything.



An alert lizard on a sunlit sidewalk, just this side of a straight line of shadow, with a hint of greenery spilling over from one side

Perhaps in fifty years, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane, will pass my shop and ask herself what strange old man is looking for his glasses in the display window, and we shall have a great deal to talk about. We will have coffees. I will save a chair for her. I am capable of that. Of waiting, of faithfulness.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs.

—Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

The trees and plants whisper loudly.



Draped with a fuchsia scarf and forest-green hoodie, the beat-up old easy chair at the firepit, the latter of which has cosy flames flowing upward from a pile of sticks, with green undergrowth and trees all around

Every time I lose a loved one . . . I feel like someone has mainlined me with an injection of life, of gratitude. I find myself staring at the pinkness of my own hands, with the blood that courses through them, some miracle I do not understand. I feel my own life force, my own mother-force, so much more strongly. I look at ordinary moments and objects: the ability to do a dish, the act of making toast, the sheer possibility of socks on my feet, wind on my skin, the ability to hear the chirping spring birds, as unbelievable fucking privileges.

—Amanda Palmer, “The State of All Things, Birthday Edition: April 2024”


A big burst of fuchsia-colored flowers in a pot on a weathered wooden deck

An array of possibilities, including ones I haven’t conceived of yet, spreads before me.


What these salt distances were

is also where they’re going:
from blankly silvered span

toward specificity: the curve
of certain brave islands of grass,

temporary shoulder-wide rivers
where herons ply their twin trades

of study and desire. . . .

—Mark Doty, “Atlantis”


A sandy coastal trail curving between fuchsia-colored ice plant and California poppies toward the sea


A closer view of the sea lions, with a poppy-studded grassy headland in the foreground and with one sea lion tall in the center, as if saying, I see you

I’m not scared.


A vertiginous gaze down over an ice-plant-and-poppy-studded cliff at a wave crashing in a gap in a headland

Much.


Your big story is hunting you. You don’t have to go looking for it. Put yourself out there in the dark, and it will come for you.

—Robert Moss

A mountain lion lurks around my campsite at night, padding and pausing like a curious, 150-pound housecat, chirping occasionally (mother to child?), undeterred by my phone’s flashlight, by the most vicious growls I can utter, by cacophonous stomping on Der Wilderbunker’s plywood-and-pallet floor, or by my great-grandmother’s sheep bell, which I rig with a rope from my cot to the entrance.



A large, rusty bell (much bigger than a sheep bell) mounted on a post among coastal wildflowers, positioned as if to summon a ship, with a seagull flying in the distance, over the ocean

“Well, there’s a book, like an encyclopedia. It’s called the Etymologiae. And it’s full of impossible things, really impossible, like griffins and phoenixes, right alongside ants and turtles and cities in Christendom. And I think this is like that. Palimpsest and the real world. An impossible beast sitting next to a possum. Or something like that.”

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

Every adrenaline-soaked night, I barely sleep, with pepper spray and a large knife at my side. Perhaps the cat is attracted to the critters who live in the floor: possums and wood rats, who, on the bright side, have been much quieter.

I attempt telepathic communication and encounter effervescent amusement, as though the mountain lion is having a delightful time. Does she think it’s funny that I’m scared? If so, is it because I have reason to be, or because I have no reason to be? I remind myself that a human is more likely to win the lottery than to get attacked by a mountain lion.



The scarecat, Shiba la Tigre, in all her glory: face of a white-tiger pillowcase in the dark blue-and-white hoodie’s hood, arms spread between a sapling branch and a wall of Der Wilderbunker, skirt of a fuchsia scarf under an apron of a dingy white towel, and fluffy red slipper-socks with white bobbles on her feet

This was how it was done: you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along. The trials and the beast were just a way of telling the world you wanted it, and the world asking in her hard way, hard as bones and hollow mountains, if you really and truly did.

—Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

When I do sleep, dreams tell me I’m safe and on a good adventure.



The caterpillar who was up the sleeve before—now seen as being yellow with a grayish stripe down the side and a bulbous, tan head—exploring the upholstery of the chair’s arm

At least I can nap during the day.



The caterpillar venturing into a shadow on the rough, pale trunk of a young but cracked and mossy tree, with bracken below and a thorny blackberry stem above

Then I’ll be in practice for dancing all night.


“. . . The man took five gold coins from his pocket and placed them in her hand. Then sell me a past, because mine is filled with blood and lamentation, and I can’t use it in my way through life. . . . She could not refuse him, because she feared that there before her in the plaza the stranger would shrivel into a little pile of dust—which is what happens to those who are not blessed with good memories. She motioned for him to sit beside her, and when she could look into his eyes, she was once again overcome with pity, and was moved by a desire to take him in her arms. She began to speak. All that afternoon and all that night she spun her tale, inventing a worthy past for the warrior, putting into the task all her vast experience and the passion the stranger had evoked. She spoke for a very long time . . . . Finally it was dawn, and with the first light of day she could tell that the odor of melancholy had faded from the air.”

—Isabel Allende, Eva Luna


More Frolics

(from most recent to most ancient)




Mannaz, rune of magic



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