Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....
In this installment of Page 69,
We put Stephani Nur Colby's Walking with the Ineffable to the test!
Set up Page 69 for us. What
are we about to read?
P. 69
details a painful childhood incident mainly in the arena of nature and culture,
where I became sadly made aware of some of the violence we people were
heedlessly wreaking on our ecology.
What is
the book about?
Walking
with the Ineffable is a memoir with a core relating to spiritual experiences,
both as an adult and as a child, and also to relationship with our natural
world. It’s about the changing weather of belief -- what, when, and why we
believe at various passages in our lives, and the startling possibilities which
can open up for us if we venture “into the unknown region” of both traditional
and unconventional mystical paths that carry us toward deeper aspects of
ourselves and of the Divine.
Does this
page give readers an accurate sense of what the collection is about? Does it
align itself with the collection’s theme?
It aligns
with part of the theme which has to do with growing awareness of the natural
world but does not touch on the search for relationship with God and its
consequences, a more pervasive aspect of the book. The shocks of personal
growth that came through contact with powerful spiritual paths and phenomena
comprise much of the memoir and are thus not well-represented by the incident
described on p. 69.
Commentary
on p.69:
To me at the
time this seemed just further evidence of the heartbreak and uncertainty of
life. But rescue was close at hand. Uncle “D,” a close family friend, visited,
took a look at the bough, and said, “Don’t worry; we can fix this.” Having me
hold the branch in its normal position, he wound layer after layer of heavy,
sticky black tape around the bark. It held up when I let go. “Now just don’t
bump it! And watch!” he said.
Over months
and a couple of years I watched the dogwood bark expand until it ultimately
covered all the tape, and no sign of injury remained. To me, it was like a
miracle and gave me new hope in life’s possibilities.
Furthermore,
Uncle D himself was a broken
branch -- a blameless
intellectual, he had been framed by an unscrupulous boss who purloined a
union’s funds. My innocent Uncle D went to prison as a result and
left it a shattered man. Yet he retained his knowledge and love of
beauty, raising two generations of my family in love and appreciation of all
the arts. The broken bough yet brought forth beauty and joy, and the teaching
that one should never despair too soon.
This is a
good sampling in the sense that much of my book deals with unexpected
resiliency in hard or challenging situations and the ubiquity of hope and
grace.
which I peered, as
if through an elegantly carved screen, at the swatches of blue sky peering back
at me through their screen of lordly oak leaves high overhead.
One day, when I went out
to play, I saw a small airplane flying low above the neighborhood, a strange
dark spray raining down from it. It gave me a bad feeling somehow. I went in to
tell my mother. She came out, looked up, and hustled me into the house. She
forbade me to go out again that day, looking troubled, but explained nothing.
The next morning, when I went out to play, I noticed odd little brown lumps
scattered all over the ground and even way up the hill beneath the tall trees.
When I went to examine one lump, I was shocked to see that it was a dead
sparrow. And, as I wandered from lump to lump, I discovered that they
were all dead sparrows, scores of them. I felt as if I were
walking in a waking nightmare in an ornithological Armageddon. In shock, I
stumbled over to my comforting Wishing Rock. Bright on its gray surface, the
pink-blossomed dogwood branch framing them, lay three pure yellow dead
goldfinches. Staggering as if with a spear in my heart, I scrambled back into
the house and told my mother. She told me that all this slaughter was due to
the DDT that the plane had sprayed to kill insects. Apparently, this poison had
also killed almost everything else. She kept me in the house again that day.
Later on my father went out with his heavy work gloves to fill a big bag with
small dead birds.
Aghast that grown-ups
could perpetrate such a rain of death, it was quite awhile before I could bring
myself to return to my dear Wishing Rock and comforting dogwood tree; the
mind-photo of three rigid, cold little goldfinch bodies arrayed funereally on
the sparkling mica always leapt up, causing a catch in my throat and the need
to turn away. A short time after I finally did resume my companionship with the
rock and tree, a particularly violent thunderstorm struck. To my distress, the
next day I found the main bough of the dogwood, as thick as a man’s wrist,
broken off, with only some thin threads of bark still maintaining their
connection with the mother tree.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stephani Nur Colby is a writer and editor who
lives in Gloucester, MA, “the last stop before Portugal.” Walking with
the Ineffable: A Spiritual Memoir (with Cats) traces her journeys
through spiritual seeking in Greek Orthodox Christianity, Sufism, herbalism and
energy-healing, Nature (especially with owls, hawks, and falcons), the
de-anaesthetizing company of lively cats, and pilgrimages and adventures in
Greece, the Holy Land, England, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Mexico, all spurred by a
persistent search for the Really Real. Walking with the Ineffable is
to be issued by Green Writers Press in August
2020.
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