"First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto the dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting struggle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. The glide of a snake belly on a branch. A single army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of the rotted tree stumps, suck life out of death. The forest eats itself and lives forever."
1st July 10
Barbara Kingsolver, ‘The Poisonwood Bible’
