Friday, January 2, 2009

Ozarks 30.7.04: Magic Waterfalls, Healing Green Smells

The green, healing smell of a mountain woodland. Or should it be “the green holy smell,” since we forget the etymological links between heal-whole-holy? To fernes halwes . . . .

I woke thinking of the description of my great-great-grandfather Lindsey’s brother Thomas Madison Lindsey. A biography of this man in a history of Moody, Texas, says that each morning when he arose, he would go to his back porch, wash his face at the washstand, jump high into the air, touch his toes with his hands, and yodel.

I don’t have the energy of my forebears, but these stories seem to run through the Lindsey line. Where is my energy gone?

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Richard Adams, Plague Dogs: “If you can’t live by rotten rules, you have to find some of your own” (438).

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Our hottest day yet here, afternoon sun picking out the colors of the fine display ahead of me, turning the brown surface of the mere to lacquered old bronze displayed in glass with lights above.

The waterfall is magic in this light—gleaming, playing motion of light, water, rock—conspiring to seduce the heart, enthrall the mind. I could gladly lie upon a lichened, sun-warmed stone across from it. I’d gladly be the stone, no other world to occupy my time than silent adoration of the fall.

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