my fairytale

Luis Marden

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)

Gold earrings, Silla Kingdom, 4th-5th century AD

People and cattle walk riverside path approaching provincial capital. Faizabad, Afghanistan. 

Cindy Baedman’s “Healing Grotto”:

“The healing grotto I created in order to work specifically with children. I had been practising as a healer and counsellor at Bath Natural Health Clinic for some time, as well as at the Cancer Self-help Centre in Bristol with Dr. Mike Weir and felt a need to ‘lighten up’. Hence after eighteen months of work, plus very many loving gifts from sometimes complete strangers, my old coal vault under the pavement of Royal Crescent in Bath, was successfully transformed into a beautiful grotto. Here I not only worked with children but also with adults sent by my local GP in various stages of mental distress such as schizophrenia.”

John Berger, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, Confabulations

“The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat.”

Andre Dubus, “On Charon’s Wharf”, Broken Vessels

“When a dead tree falls in a forest it often falls into the arms of a living tree. The dead, thus embraced, rasp in wind, slowly carving a niche in the living branch, shearing away the rough outer flesh, revealing the pinkish, yellowish, feverish inner bark. For years the dead tree rubs its fallen body against the living, building its dead music, making its raw mark, wearing the tough bough down as it moans and bends, the deep rosined bow sound of the living shouldering the dead.”