The stomach lining from a sheep we slaughtered last fall "Long before writing was invented, human beings read their world. They interpreted their dreams and the flights of birds. They read the intestines of sacrificial animals and the memories of their ancestors. They read the things that surprised them, or the things that reminded them of something else. Most of all, they read in the places where there were holes — spaces — gaps. They filled up the blanks of the universe, as though they were pages, with writing. Leonardo advised aspiring artists to "discover" the pictures to be found in the cracks in walls; Chinese sages were conceived as their mothers stepped into the footprints of unicorns; all of us make up our lives out of the cracks in the walls or our past memories and the unicorn footprints of our futures. The making of a life is similar to the making of a text. We live by reading our own stories. We read by recall and imagination. A sacred text is made by making up what is felt to be already there, just like a life. A sacred text is an impression in stone, or imagination filling up the maker of the space."
-Linda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred
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AuthorThe adventures, studies, and musings of a student at the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism.
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