Tag Archives: mano

On Creativity, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Rain in the Desert

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Slow, huge thunderheads.

Rain had washed everything, as though it had doused the desert with a gigantic fire hose. The daisies’ faces were plastered to the ground.

A pretty mano of pink granite. Where it lay was wilder than when it was made by an Archaic hunter-gatherer, probably a woman: only the rare hiker goes there now. The mano had been looking at the sky for two thousand years, at least. I admired it, then left it to its next eons of quiet and space and rain.

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On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Two Hands and Time

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Writer-illustrator Betsy James, in conversation with older readers

In the sand of the Ojito Wilderness, a cracked Archaic mano, a grindstone. Crystalline quartzite, red and white and yellow, with a slanted edge that provided a perfect grip. I hooked my fingers there, seeing another woman’s hand: small like mine, probably young, with broken nails.

After twenty centuries, the stone remembers that other hand.

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