This is the blog for the Bentari Project.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
“This place had seen time. This place had known time; truly, fully known and understood. Here, time was not measured by man’s modern calendar. Here, days and months and decades were meaningless. A millennium, a thousand years, was not even like a fraction of a second, and was paid less heed than we would lend to the blinking of our watery eye. For ...
Read full postSaturday, December 18, 2010
My story is about young Bentari, but his mother and her selfless care for him are clearly the enabling power behind his surprising abilities. Well, my own mother’s final stand is represented in the story, if only in a small way. It’s mighty important to me. See first paragraph, chapter 19—the odd word “fistula” is not accidental. Mom spent the last...
Read full postSaturday, December 11, 2010
The “Web of Life” means a great deal to me—that connection binding all beings together. We are all here. Living on a small bluish planet in one fantastic Petri dish called “Life on Earth”—we are here together. We share a common natural history. We coexist. And we are co-dependent. Non-human animals have meant the most to me as I grew up. They are m...
Read full postSaturday, December 11, 2010
What luck her brood has. For this mother wrote the book on maternal devotion. She doesn’t just follow the ancient call. She leads it. She thrusts it heavenward by her example. Just watch her. See her lay such a monumental clutch of eggs. See her swaddle them in that web casing that may as well be steel, for it is impenetrable to the spider’s winged...
Read full postSaturday, December 11, 2010
And the mother spider spends all her days and all her nights huddled next to her egg sac. She has covered it with a gossamer sheet. Inside it she has stowed one slender moth. The moth would make a good final snack for the mother spider, but she doesn’t take a bite of it. She stands her watch, night and day, right by it, but she lets it be. It will ...
Read full postSaturday, December 04, 2010
Everyone has played the game “rock breaks scissors”. As kids, we played it at length, with the winners of each round exacting wet-fingered wrist-slaps to losers until it was hard to say which hurt more—the winners’ fingers or the losers’ wrists. We were young but we understood the odd paradox implied by the game’s name—that the apparent weak elemen...
Read full postSunday, November 07, 2010
“Just as Mirawami concluded her serenade, the council raucously dispersed upon Mankani’s bold decree. The elders went straight to their homes, loudly calling together their unwed sons, their nephews, and sons-in-law. These were the warriors in their charge, so that each elder led a small squad of five to ten fighting men. Elders shouted, men came t...
Read full postWednesday, September 29, 2010
A Thousand Sisters, by Lisa Shannon. What an extraordinary memoire! What an epic journey—the saga of one woman from Portland, how she came to be gripped with care, remorse, guilt and love for women suffering a world away—and how she came to act! And, such action! This book, gushing with all the human emotions from dry-witted humor to gut-wrenching ...
Read full postMonday, September 27, 2010
“Sadly, he had led the men against his will. Tragically, he was beaten for the smile he wore despite his sadness. Wonderfully, the pain turned into glory when Bentari’s blurry eyes beheld his family’s crest above him on that giant stone. No other man or boy would see it. No one could tell that the rough red surface of that tall monolith was anythin...
Read full postSunday, September 19, 2010
“Wulumbo Falls lay near the northern end of the valley, and this was the wellspring of the Kwa River. The headwaters formed where the drainage funneled down through lava cliffs and spilled forth between two jutting peaks that stood like parapets atop the wall of rock. Now the falls were diminished by the season’s long drought. The water spilled laz...
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