Chapter 1
A THROBBING IN THE AIR
"Meet Rosy, the matriarch," says Jay Haight, from inside a cage in the elephant house in the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon. The Asian elephant looms above him as they walk toward the thick vertical bars that separate them from me. Jay's shoulder is level with the bottom of Rosy's fight ear, which, like her forehead and trunk, is pink-bordered with delicate pale tan and gray spots. The spots are denser at the bottom than at the top, as if they were particles slowly sliding down a liquid poured from the top of her forehead. Her body rises and sinks hugely with each step. One shoulder at a time shifts upward and bulges; one knee at a time straightens and accepts weight; underneath the vast belly the opposite leg moves forward; the broad toe-nailed foot swings forward just above the concrete floor, sets itself down, and splays out. Steadily, the feet, legs, and shoulders shift, muscles alternating, bulk flowing forward, huge and slow. The eyes are looking down; the speckled ears are waving slowly and symmetrically in and out; the face -- well, to call it a face...
"A-l-l right," says Jay, and the feet and shoulders and belly and back come to a rest, sinking a little. I look up at an immense gray forehead. At its base the forehead gives way to the broad top of the freckled trunk, larger in girth than my girth, longer than I am tall, on each side a gray cheek wider than my torso. From a wrinkled leather pocket on the forward side of the left cheek a patient amber eye looks down. I can see that eye but not the other. Raising myself on tiptoes and leaning close to pat Rosy's forehead, I can't see either one. Her mouth is hidden, too, under her trunk. The dry soft leather of her forehead is warm, warmer than my hand. I slide my hand down the wall of the forehead to the top of the trunk and then down the trunk, passing it over row upon row of thick warm wrinkles. All the time the trunk is moving, its tip searching and reaching this way and that, hovering, whiffing, eventually reaching tentatively through the bars and approaching my other hand, which I hold open and still.
"Hello, Rosy," I say in a low voice, and under the hand that is still stroking the trunk I feel a shiver.
"A-l-l right," says Jay to Rosy, and to me, "Meet her son Rama. Thirteen months old. HEY there, Rama, watch out!"
Out of the top of Rama's head and along his back spring wiry orange and black hairs. He looks up from below me with a full face, two wild eyes visible at once. The whites of the eyes show; he looks surprised, and I respond with a smile. Pressing against his mother, Rama stretches his short, stubby trunk through the bars next to Rosy's long, supple one, and the open tip of each is pink and flexible, cool and wet as it gropes and sniffs my hand.
"This one is Hanako. GET OVER HERE, HANAKO! BACK UP, ROSE. BACK, RAMA! BACK!! Hanako's big boy here is our first grandchild. He's nineteen months old. Git over, Look-Chai, meet Katy."
"Ah!" I hold out my hand, but it is my sandaled feet that the elephants' trunks are delicately exploring, tickling them with breath.
A tall, quiet keeper named Jim Spenser now joins Jay in the cage: he's brought a wheelbarrow and two shovels. The two men fill the barrow with elephant dung. The elephants seem glad that Jim has come: I notice the gladness as a relaxation, and I feel a faint thrill in the air and hear a gentle rumble as he strokes Rosy's trunk between her eyes. The men stand together, each rubbing a different elephant. The elephants' trunks reach around the men's bodies, sniffing.
The keepers ask me what inspired me to come for this visit. I tell them I'm an acoustic biologist from Cornell University, and I've been wondering what kinds of sounds elephants make. I've spent the last fifteen years studying the songs of whales, which are long and complex, and change continuously and progressively. Last week some colleagues who also study culture (learned behavior) in animals invited me to California so we could compare our findings. That brought me within reach of this zoo, with its eleven elephants. I called Warren Iliff, the zoo's director, and he said sure, come ahead, you can spend the first week in May with our elephants if you like.
Jim and Jay tell me about Look-Chai's heritage and the circumstances of his birth. His grandmother, old Tuy Hoa from Vietnam, was the zoo's first elephant. She gave birth to Hanako in 1963. Hanako grew up in the zoo and in her nineteen years gave birth four times; but of her calves only Look-Chai has survived.
Tuy Hoa was old and arthritic during Hanako's fourth pregnancy. The vet decided not to risk having her present at the birth, for even standing up was harmful to her. But they moved Hanako into an adjacent cage where the mother and daughter would be able to smell and hear each other, for a grandmother elephant would naturally assist in birthing. Hanako labored for two days without giving birth. At last, exhausted and worried, the vet and keepers opened the gate connecting the cages. As Hanako ran to her mother both elephants bellowed, rumbled, trumpeted, and screamed, and from other elephant cages farther back in the building came answering rumbles, trumpets, and screams. Then Hanako dropped Look-Chai onto the floor beside his grandmother.
Within two weeks an extraordinary thing happened. Milk formed in the old grandmother's breasts, although she had not had a calf of her own for several years. Along with Hanako, Tuy Hoa nursed the last of her descendants to be born in her life-time.
"This one is Pet," says Jay. "GET BACK, LOOK-CHAI! Pet's the bottom of the social heap. She'll do anything to stay subordinate -- you'll see." Pet's yearling daughter, Sunshine, is pushing forward to join her, and now six trunks are hovering and gliding a few inches from my feet, legs, hands, and belly.
Suddenly Jay makes a decision: no more trunks allowed on my side of the bars. He shouts a volley of commands, and swats each reaching trunk with the flat side of an elephant hook until they reluctantly withdraw.
"And don't you let them sniff you if we're not here," says Jay to me.
Rama starts to break the rule. "No, Rama," I say.
"But you should not discipline them," says Jay, quickly. "GET BACK, RAMA! The only people who should try to establish discipline are the ones who will enforce it. We'll tell you stories..." And they did. Only a fool attempts to read the mind of an elephant, and I heard about quantities of fools. Each of them had been a fool at least once. Fools had been kneeled on and pressed against concrete walls; some had died. "You'll be noodles if they drag you through the bars," the men warned me. They finished cleaning the cage, ordered the elephants to stay away from me, and left for lunch.
The indoor air was chilly and dank, and I was tired. I leaned my head against one of the bars, thinking how to begin, and closed my eyes. But a sudden feeling of warmth on my left shoulder caused me to open them again. The radiator was Rosy's body -- she had moved up against the bars as close to me as she could get, beginning a process that was repeated each time the keepers left, a slow, gradual migration of all the elephants in my direction. Six trunks reached slightly through the bars, gently surrounding me with whiffing as the elephants decided, more deliberately than before, who I was.
Thus began my first week in a matriarchy. A calm, pervasive discipline regulated the elephants' behavior, for the three adults, born on separate continents and thrown together in captivity, had established a dynamic order among themselves. Rosy, though smaller than Hanako, was the eldest, and whenever no keepers were present her authority was supreme.
It was an authority that extended to and included me. I thought about that as I listened to the whiffing, the inhaling of my smell along with the smells of one another's dung and urine and flesh along with the hay and fruit and nuts on the cage floor. Of what did the authority consist, and how was it communicated among the elephants? I sensed a comprehensive but relaxed mutual attention. Rosy was granting her herd the privilege of exploring my smell carefully. She was granting me the privilege of being carefully smelled. She growled when a calf became too inquisitive, and the little trunk hastily withdrew. Not sure how to keep my end of the bargain, I stayed quiet and kept my hands still, without hiding my interest. When an adult moved in close to the bars I looked up into the hazy dark pupil of her solemn eye. The pupil was so large that I never felt our eyes really met: I didn't know whether I was in or out of focus. I wished that I had a hovering and whiffing trunk of my own so I could learn the same things about the elephants that they were learning about me.
The square, burly babies moved on to nurse and explore with their supple trunks. Scooping up, sucking in, puffing, sniffing, blowing out, they took in every detail of the floors and walls. In a burst of vertical curiosity all trunks lifted at once, and for a minute or two the three little elephants walked about exploring smells high over their heads. Encountering one another, they entwined trunks, putting the tips in one another's mouths or ears and sniffing. They invented strategy upon strategy for picking things up, with mixed success. Their fuzzy heads were littered with bits of slung hay. They groomed one another and put what they found in their mouths or ears, or poofed the scraps into the corners of the stall. They galloped stiff-legged, heads high, trunks surging, feet loose and floppy, foreheads wrinkled up and eyes wide. At a certain level of abandon, the mothers subdued and separated them. In this they reminded me of the mother right whales that Roger, my husband, and I had watched a decade earlier from the cliffs of the Peninsula Valdés in Argentina. When the whales subdued and separated their calves, we had surmised that the mothers were saving their collective metabolic energy for the long migration across the South Atlantic Ocean to South Georgia and back.
In the back room, our feet up on desks, their hooks laid down and my pencil taken up, the keepers and I compared experiences. They wanted to know what whales were like. I told them about watching the sea hour after hour through binoculars, searching for distant dark shapes-teardrops and exclamation points -- which were the caps of whales' backs visible on the surface on a clear and calm day. There were lucky hours when a group of whales would come so close under our cliff that we could identify them as individuals; then for the rest of the day we'd watch them slide away across the silver sea to line up parallel and slip down under, perhaps to rise again a half mile farther out, and be joined by others, and line up parallel, and disappear again, heading for the mouth of the Golfo San José, from which if you go due east, the first land you will strike is New Zealand.
They told me about one swaying elephant belly at a time. About elephants' knees in their faces. About dangerous, affectionate, and often inscrutable individuals. The elephants they knew were as full of quirks and idiosyncrasies as an assortment of very weird people. The confinement and echoing walls of the elephant house amplified whatever propensities each captive animal and each keeper had for dominance, retribution, compassion, and caregiving. These exaggerated personalities were the basis of the relationships that developed within the walls.
Except for an occasional break to mn down a path through a forest just below the zoo, and then up again, I spent the whole of every day in the elephant house. Elephants may not have been the only interesting animals in the zoo, but I had eyes, or ears, only for them. At the end of the week I boarded a plane and started the journey home. My ears and the back of my neck were itchy with pins and needles of straw and hay and other zoo frass. I rocked a plastic bag into the overhead bin -- my barn jacket, bagged to preserve its smell. I sighed to think that the warm beings who had taken such an interest in my smell would become a fading memory as I got back to normal life.
The sigh acknowledged a slight failure as well as sadness. I would have liked to learn something new, but it seemed that the time was not ripe. I closed my eyes to review the happenings I'd witnessed in the zoo. I would glean them, and then say good-bye.
Here stood Pet in the back comer, the end of her trunk moving over the floor like a squeegee, collecting together a few last stems and scraps in the hour before feeding time. Here came Hanako and Rama sauntering in her direction. Were they coming to visit her, or to deprive her of what she had gathered? The latter, I decided, and I watched carefully, thinking of Jay's comment that Pet would do anything to stay on the bottom of the hierarchy. I heard a faint rumble and the animals shifted, but Pet held her own. The air thrilled a little: I felt happy for Pet.
Here came Jim with the grain and hay. All the elephants moved to greet him, and I enjoyed his gentle voice, and again sensed a kind of thrill in the air.
Here stood little Sunshine reaching toward me through the bars; behind her, her mother standing by, to "turn me into noodles" should I prove untrustworthy. The airplane throbbed, reminding me of the faint throbbing, or thrilling, or shuddering I'd felt at that moment. It had been like the feeling of thunder but there'd been no thunder. There had been no loud sound at all, just throbbing and then nothing.
Now a recollection from more than thirty years earlier joined the first. I was thirteen years old, and I was standing not in a zoo but in Sage Chapel at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And what I was hearing was not silence but enormous chords from a pipe organ that was accompanying singers, and I was one of the singers. My mother was across the room in the alto section. The organist and conductor were lit by lamps that illuminated their music. The little circles of yellow light from the lamps were framed by the darkness of early evening inside a vast building. High up in the space a series of round stained-glass windows, still receiving light from the sky, glowed down on us.
The organ was alive. In a powerful combination of voices it was introducing the great chorus that opens the second half of Bach's Passion According to St Matthew; we were drawing breath to sing, "Oh man, bewail thy grievous sin." The organist pulled out the great stop and the air around me began to shudder and throb. The bass notes descended in a scale. The deeper they went, the slower the shuddering became. The pitch grew indistinct and muffled, yet the shuddering got stronger. I felt what I could not hear. My ears were approaching the lower limit of their ability to perceive vibrations as sound.
Is that what I was feeling as I sat beside the elephant cage? Sound too low for me to hear, yet so powerful it caused the air to throb? Were the elephants calling to each other in infrasound?
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wind, thunder, and ocean storms -- gigantic motions of earth, air, fire, and water -- these are the main sources of infrasound, sound below the range of human hearing, which travels huge distances though rock, water, and air. Among animals only the great fin and blue whales were known to make powerful infrasonic calls. No land animal approached the mass or power of these great mammals of the sea, but now I wondered: might elephants, too, be using infrasound in communication?
Once home, I called Carl Hopkins and Bob Capranica, acoustic biologists at Cornell whom I'd known slightly for a long time. Without a moment of hesitation they offered to loan me equipment that could record and measure infrasound, and challenged me to go back to the zoo and find out what was going on.
Four months later I returned to the zoo with the borrowed equipment and two old friends, Bill Langbauer, a biologist whose doctoral research had been a study of captive dolphins, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, like myself an unquenchable observer. John McIlhenny, a generous friend with a long-held interest in zoos and elephants, gave us plane tickets. Another friend, Loki Osborn, organized free meals for us at Lewis and Clark College, where he was a student, and got us the laundry room floor in a dormitory as a place to sleep, joining us whenever his own work allowed.
With the help of the keepers, we recorded everything any of us thought might be interesting. We ran the tape recorder at its slowest speed so that in playing back the tapes we could speed them up, raising the pitch of all recorded sounds and bringing the lowest sounds into the range of human hearing. Hoping to learn the meanings of particular calls, we kept written notes, mapped the elephants' movements, and used a mechanical event recorder to time the changes in behavior we noticed.
The elephants had been rearranged since I'd visited them in May. Rama and Look-Chai had been sold and trucked away, and Hanako had been moved to another cage. Now there were just four residents in the big exhibit hall -- Pet, Sunshine, Rosy, and Rosy's daughter Metu. In this grouping Rosy was again the oldest, and the undisputed matriarch.
As we recorded, a strange saga unfolded. Metu, who had recently lost a calf in a zoo accident, wanted to adopt Pet's calf, Sunshine. Pet was a dedicated mother, but she was also Metu's subordinate. Rosy was indifferent to the contest between the young adults, but she, too, was partial to the calf. Only Pet had milk for Sunshine, but everyone had a belly she might sleep under. Sunshine liked all the adults and wandered unperturbed between her mother, her adoptive aunt, and her adoptive grandmother. But signs of fatigue in Sunshine led to signs of strain between Pet and Metu as each one jockeyed for the privilege of standing over the sleeping baby. One night, unable to resolve their struggle for custody, they settled for standing side by side facing Sunshine, with their two trunks laid side by side over her back as it rose and fell in the slow breathing of sleep.
In the cold yellow-green fluorescent light, we watched, reminded of the biblical women who, each claiming to be the mother of the same child, had sought King Solomon's advice; and King Solomon had laid his sword, as they were laying their trunks, in such a way that it suggested a fair division of the child into two pieces. What stirred in Pet but motherhood? What stirred in Metu but longing for her own calf? What stirred in them both were feelings so akin to feelings we all recognized that no translation was required. This was a vigil, this was a contest, fueled by the same energies that fuel human contests.
Metu started swaying, as animals often do in zoos, bumping Pet's shoulder or leaning heavily against her at the end of each sway. This caused Pet to shuffle slightly to the side. With every bump she moved a little nearer to her calf's tail. Metu's sways became more and more exaggerated until they were preposterous. There was no question that she intended to displace Pet, and indeed, shuffle by reluctant shuffle, inch by inch, Pet was relinquishing her position. Eventually she gave up and retired to the back of the stall, where she flung hay against the wall, coughing loudly. Metu immediately stepped into the position she had won. A sleeping baby lay in the center of the rectangle made by her four feet. There she stood for hours without moving, a happy, fulfilled four-poster bed.
In the morning, Sunshine woke feeling fine and entertained herself with a heap of lettuce. She flung lettuce leaves onto her back, she skated on whole lettuces, she slipped on them, slid down onto her front knees, then onto her back knees, than stiffened her front legs and pressed lettuce into the floor with her forehead. She rubbed lettuce on a part of her leg that had been irritated by a chain. She put lettuce in the water trough, drank messily, and poured gallons of water onto the floor with her trunk. So began the day. But when evening came, she chose to sleep under Rosy. Protected by the matriarch's dominance, she averted the contest between her mother and Metu, and everybody slept better.
One day, Sunshine and her mother were taken into an adjacent cage so that Pet's feet could be cleaned and medicated. In their absence Metu bellowed, slammed her body against the wall, then stood on her hind legs, reaching her trunk over it to sniff the chamber that contained the object of her desire. On the other side of the wall, Sunshine was tipping around in circles with her eyes rolled up white, squealing. When the great hydraulic door between the two chambers opened, Sunshine rushed to greet Mere amid screaming and rumbling from all three animals. Then she rushed back to her mother, Pet, and nursed from one of the two plump, humanlike breasts that hung full of milk between her front legs. Metu reached with her trunk to pull at her own barren nipples, then quickly stepped beside Pet and reached her trunk to Pet's fight breast. She returned her trunk, now milky, to her own breast, which she coated with Pet's milk.
The adult elephants competed less dramatically for hay and space, for it was a foregone conclusion that Pet's share would be less than Metu's and Metu's share would be less than Rosy's, and every elephant would hold her peace. As for Sunshine, she was welcome to go wherever and eat whatever she wished.
Pet had a special skill, an adjunct to her poverty. She spent hours of every day gleaning -- using her trunk as a blower to gather into piles the little bits of hay that remained after the other elephants had fed. She would slowly rotate the tip of her trunk in a circle with a two-foot diameter, focusing it always toward the center. When the crumbs were consolidated she would carefully lift them with the tip of her trunk and place them on her tongue. No other elephant had such a mastery of this art. For all her effort, however, she remained the thinnest member of the herd.
Metu also had a feeding specialty. She would store hay in her lower lip while eating from the upper. Then she would move the stored pile to the upper lip and refill the lower. None of the other elephants did this.
So Metu was a hoarder and Pet a gleaner. Except in relation to Sunshine, there seemed to be a general good-naturedness about the unequal division of property. As Jay had pointed out, Pet insisted on her place at the bottom of the social ladder just as the other adults insisted on their places higher up. Dominance hierarchies, although established through competition, are ultimately the result of a collaborative effort.
Outside in a large sand yard, a male elephant named Tunga was living a miserable existence, trapped in an uncomfortable state called musth. Musth is the condition in which mature males appear to do their most successful mating. Tunga's body was charged with testosterone, which made him aggressive, restless, and inconsolable in his solitary confinement. He paced around his yard, throwing water and dirt clods at visiting people, being shouted at by his keepers, eating almost nothing, and losing weight. His hormones would not let him rest, and the abnormal proximity to the zoo's two other males would not let his hormones rest -- this at least is my interpretation, since musth acts, among other things, as a spacing mechanism. He had been in musth for six months and had lost over 1,100 pounds. He was an enormous, unhappy bag of bones.
In his contentious frame of mind Tunga had bitten off the end of another elephant's trunk during a period when both were in musth. Poor Hugo was the loser. It had happened in the aftermath of bad behavior from the zoo's largest and third male, Pachy. Pachy didn't appreciate confinement -- he used to slam his cage till our ears rang and teeth rattled -- and on this day he had beaten down the door of his cage. While the keepers repaired the broken door, they had no choice but to move two of the bulls into adjacent cages. Hugo and Tunga seemed the least fractious, but the move was no sooner accomplished than Hugo reached his trunk around to explore the smell of Tunga's cage -- and lost the organ of exploration.
There was no way to see natural male behavior in this environment. We could only move from cage to cage, recording the sounds, locations, movements, and actions of the elephants in them. In moments of excitement we heard high-pitched chirps and barks from females and calves. We heard, and some of us felt, low rambles, and were aware that these were contagious, sometimes spreading from one cage to another. It seemed that most of the calls were made by females. But in the wee hours of the morning, when the adult elephants would lie down, we heard males and females alike snoring, with long, slow strains of sound that varied from individual to individual. Tunga's snores were sonorous and drawn out, like chords from an organ. They conveyed to my ears a noble peace that contrasted with his miserable waking life. I was moved to hear them and made a long recording one night to remember him by, and to think about what he might have been as a free bull in a world large enough to hold him.
Some nights Liz, Loki, Bill, and I worked around the clock, taking turns recording, observing, and resting. We rested in the back of the barn below a towering stack of hay bales; hung on the walls were huge shovels and many-tined pitchforks, huge chains, black slickers, and two girths, like horses' girths. There was a grimy desk in a back comer on which we piled our grimy belongings and our peanut butter, raisins, apples, and cheese, next to a grimy coffee machine and a grimy telephone. Above these hung huge cylindrical heating pipes, from which were suspended a filthy blue inflated plastic elephant and enormous lights that illuminated a set of ancient and magnificently gross spiderwebs, layer draped from layer. It was a wonderful room, sneezy with the smell of hay and alive with the quiet movements of sleepy animals. Remembering the atmosphere in the barn in my farming childhood, I felt comfortable there.
During our hours of recording, Liz and I felt throbbing in the air every now and then when we heard nothing. We kept notes on the timing of these events. Bill felt nothing, and said we must not be disappointed if all we managed to do was to record the calls we could hear and link them to behavior. We continued to collect our recordings in such a way that infrasound, if it was present, would also be documented. But for reasons that perhaps stemmed from Bill's doubts, and perhaps from our desire to use all our time and battery power recording, none of us listened to the tapes during our month together. When we dispersed, Bill to New York City, Liz to Peterborough, New Hampshire, and I to Ithaca, we did not know what I was carrying in my briefcase.
It was the eve of Thanksgiving when I opened it. Carl Hopkins was working in his Cornell lab on that evening, and was not too busy to receive a visitor. He rigged the recorder to a machine of his own invention, which displayed a sequence of sounds as dots on a screen, while I selected a tape from a period when Liz and I had felt shuddering in the air. Rosy had just walked to the end of the spacious exhibition cage, and was standing alone facing its thick outer concrete wall. Liz, whispering "I feel it!" had run outdoors to look in the large sand yard for Tunga. She had found him opposite Rosy and almost touching the same wall that Rosy was facing from the inside. Their heads were within three feet of each other, and if the wall had been removed they would have been face-to-face.
The flickering dots of light on the screen of Carl's machine, and the crisscrossing black curves printed on the page, revealed a complex array of overlapping animal calls that none of us had heard in the zoo. With the tape running ten times its usual speed, we heard the calls, condensed and nearly three octaves too high -- a little like the mooing of cows. The loudest calls coincided with a period when Liz and I had both sensed throbbing. Two animals had been carrying on an extensive and animated conversation below the range of human hearing. I suppose that they were Rosy and Tunga, calling to each other through the wall.
I looked up as the tape ended and saw a funny quizzical expression on Carl's face. "Goddamned infrasound," he mumbled, and I laughed. Goddamned infrasound, you were a mode of airborne communication all these years while Carl was teaching the sensory world to cohort after cohort of students, and you didn't show your face. Slowly, he began to smile the smile of a contented philosopher. "Infrasound," he mused, with his eyes still on the spectrogram. Then he looked up at me kindly, a hint of paternal worry in his eyes. "If I were you," he said, "I wouldn't tell anybody about this just yet."
I went home and tumbled into bed. Immediately I received a dream.
I was lying in a deep, damp, warm grassy sward in the faint light of predawn. Close, in fact looming over me, was a swaying, silent circle of elephants. They were large and small, and several were reaching out with their trunks to sniff me where I lay, tiny and helpless. They swayed hugely, breathing over me for a long time, and then the largest female spoke in a voice that I heard the way you can sometimes hear in a dream, without vocal features, language, or sound. "We did not reveal this to you so you would tell other people."
I lay silent, holding my breath, waiting for more. But there was only the sound of the elephants' breathing and their strange eyes looking down, down, and down at me, me at the very bottom of all those trunks and all those gazes, with the serious, inscrutable expression that I associate uniquely with elephants.
Gradually the image faded, and I woke in the predawn of Thanksgiving Day. At six o'clock the Ithaca Quakers (Friends) would gather in a silent meeting to bring in the dawn. I rose and put on warm clothes, boots, mittens, and a coat, climbed into the car, and drove through darkness over snow to the old meetinghouse in the country.
Seven Friends were there ahead of me. The woodstove in the middle of the dark old wooden room had been lit, and its warmth was just beginning to push back the chill. The flickering of flames inside the stove sent erratic flashes out through the vent. This and a candle were the only sources of light. I did not know whose lumpy, blanket-wrapped forms surrounded me on the benches facing the stove. We settled, each into our own mound of blankets and our own reverence, or thought, or nothingness.
Inside me, the dream was drumming on my heart. From somewhere outside myself I saw myself stand up between two of the shapes on the benches. The gathered Friends listened as people do when sound comes out of deep silence. I did not hear my own voice, but in the gray light now entering the room through the clear glass of tall windows, I saw tears running down the cheeks of a woman I did not know. I sat down. We remained in silence until the end of the hour. Then, taking our blankets, we dispersed to celebrate the day, each in our own form of thanksgiving.
Copyright © 1998 by Katy Payne