I am pleased with my newfound ability to decorate things with strawberries. It’s as if I’ve discovered imagination: flexing to see what I can and can’t do, and realizing, with a thrill: I can do anything! I can fill my chest with strawberries. I can fill my heart with strawberries. I can fill the mountain with strawberries.
Thousght and feeling feed each other without friction or delay. Thought is lush with feeling. In a cave in the belly of the mountain, a lake, covered with ice. Below the surface of the lake, seals. The seals are nosing strawberries up through holes in the ice. On the surface of the lake, people are skating and dancing. Time is moving fast; centuries go by.
Tiny strawberries in our blood. Invisible strawberry storms, moving through us like dark matter. Jam. A child sleeping on a pile of sealskins. Seals and skins, lakes and berries, dancers and... catapults! The thrill of each image—each rich and saturated with meaning—and then thrill at the quantity of images, how quickly they come, how inexhaustible the chain.
The strawberries race up the side of the mountain, unfurling, row by row. Let’s do it again: down the mountain we go, and now up again, a thicker line, ten strawberry-feet wide. We’re flying up the mountain and the strawberries come as fast as I need them. Everything beautiful I’ve ever known is accessible. Kent’s laughter filters in. I open my eyes. I’m in a bed, it’s afternoon, there’s light from the sunroom. If this is “ground,” it, too, is magical.