Lent Day Sixteen

And now for something not quite at all different...
from Annie Dillard (1982, 1992): "Teaching a Stone to Talk" Harper Perennial

page 69

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience – even silence – by choice. The thing to do is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t 'attack' anything; a weasel lives as he is meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.