1: Theme

When is the memory from.

It must have been from very early on. Barely walking.

The rain had been pouring.

From a discrete point, far above, strictly, coldly. But there was also a light, generous and plentiful and pure.

The world was bright and boundless, never still and ever-changing, holy and also frightening.

From somewhere wafted a scent sweet and delicate. There was a natural earthenness intermingled with saccharine smokiness, rising from the pores of the earth, but amidst it was this unmistakable and fragrant sweetness.

The wind was blowing.

Its sounds, as light and breezy as the air that shaped it, suffused all. Leaves on tree branches whispered, heard but not known.

But that wasn’t all. Countless things, tiny and definite and vivid, sparkled through the air. How to describe them?

Before mama, before papa, there was a yearning to capture this image, to render it just as vividly.

The answer, immediate yet ungraspable. Tantalizing.

Before the answer reveals itself, a torrent of sound diverts all thought. Showers, with a sound colorful and alive. Like ripples or echoes, it propagated through all the world.

To become one with that resonance, my being itself felt embraced, soothed, calmed.

If those sensations, those images, were ever to return, surely I would have felt thus—

An infinitude of honeybees crossing a bright vast field, rejoicing in the world.

A world saturated with a music sonorous and noble.

---