this one's for the trees

The good Scott Chicken is looking out for my election-obsessed ass, and has passed this meme my way. Shut up, I know I just did one. Shut up, I don't care. Can't fill a whole year up with solid gold, people. And this comes just in time because today I believe I have "crossed a threshold"...into election-related high blood pressure. I felt it today right there in my chest. Heart all squeezey whilst reading about the politics. And then when I took a stroll in the Arboretum with a dear friend out in the drizzle and trees and fresh air and floral breezes...heart not squeezey any more.

So I'm meming it, as yet another form of escape. You're welcome, Clinton campaign. My can of whoop-ass* will remain shelved.

*Whup-ass? Whoop-ass? Whooping ass. "My child has come down with a horrible case of whooping ass."

Here's the meme at hand:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open it at page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence/ phrase.
4. Blog the next four sentences/ phrases together with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig your shelves for that very special or intellectual book.
6. Pass it forward to six friends

All right, I swear that this is the nearest book. I've never heard of it and don't know how it got into the house. (Dave? This you?) The book is Little Saint by Hannah Green. It's a "meditation on the millennia-long life of a French child martyr."

The road runs right through it, and the part of the wood to the south is a perfect rectangle, and the part to the north is larger, longer and hexagonal, the shape of the old hexagonal reliquaries in the Treasure with their patches of Merovingian glasswork and their gemstones glowing and their windows of ancient glass, so that entering into the fragrant twilight of the fir wood, where quiet is defined by birdsong, we feel we are in a holy grove, protected, like spirit bones within a reliquary. The trees in perfect rows form long corridors that open at the end into the pale north sky, and the sun in the needles above us is silvery and refracted like a star.

Okay. That's more than four phrases and less than four sentences and seemed like the correct chunk. Hmm. It's very tree-y. Like an ARBORETUM. Man, I love things like that. Tiny synchronicities. On the subject of trees, I just want to give a shout-out to the Chinese red birches I saw at the Arboretum today. They may be the most beautiful trees I've ever seen in my life. They're looked like the trees that would be on Venus if Venus were acting like a metaphor and not like whatever gaseous reality it is. (I just looked up some facts about Venus. The cloud cover is super dense and a day on Venus lasts 234 Earth days! And yet there still may not be enough days in a year for Venusians to get their shit done. Am I right or am I right? Who's busy out there? Oh, Lord. I swear.) I gave one of those birches a good pet on the trunk, and it felt so lovely. I could have stood there for days. Venus days.

I pass this meme on to the six of you who want to do it, but come back and tell me that you did so I can go look and then tell everybody that you did it.