Moving into stillness

At night some understand what the grass says.

The grass knows a word or two.

It is not much. It repeats the same word

Again and again, but not too loudly...

from "Evening" by Charles Simic

During my student years, which, really I must confess, persist after all this time, I made paper by collecting weeds from the sides of the roads. Although they did not look like weeds to me, but tall slender grasses toasted to a golden wheat color by the sun, delicately, and on all sides, like the way a good baker rotates her baking sheets when her wares are in the oven so that the golden coat is even. It was summer and hot and the grasses were sentries that stood between the highway gravel and that other world that begins with dirt and goes on beyond time.

I marveled at seeing these grasses transformed into paper. It bordered on magic and myth, like learning Rumpelstiltskin's trick without the bargain or the temper. Depending upon the grasses I collected, the paper would change in my hands. One of my favorite materials turned out to be corn husks and not a grass at all.

The most delicate papers were made from the bark of a ficus tree by way of a time-consuming process. It involved not the green leaves but the bark, which I peeled and opened and scraped out the viscous interior of each carefully selected branch. Hidden within these branches were gossamer sheets of paper like the mass wafers that would melt on the tongue during communion. These sheets I wanted to preserve for the best of ideas, for the deepest expressions of the heart. Maybe because this paper came from a place that could not upon first look be seen. It had to be coaxed into being, but once brought forth its beauty, like beauty once recognized in all things, could never again be unseen.

The grasses in the canyon this year after all of our rain now remind me of the grasses I long ago cut down and gathered up and boiled down and lay out to dry in sheets that, again, I could cut, this time into pages. And these pages held words that I spread around like the seeds of these grasses that had once upon a time been cast about by the wind. Like prayers at dawn. These seeds becoming pages. These prayers becoming messengers of joy.

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Breathing fast and slow

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