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How Come We've Got These Bodies? They Are Frail Supports For What We Feel. There Are Times I Get So Hemmed In By My Arms And Legs I Look Forward To Getting Past Them. As Though Death Will Set Me Free Like A Traveling Cloud... I'll Be Out There As A Piece Of The Endless Body Of The World Feeling Pleasures So Much Larger Than Skin And Bones And Blood.

-Louise Erdrich

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How Come We've Got

Louise Erdrich

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How Come We've Got These Bodies? They Are Frail Supports For What We Feel. There Are Times I Get So Hemmed In By My Arms And Legs I Look Forward To Getting Past Them. As Though Death Will Set Me Free Like A Traveling Cloud... I'll Be Out There As A Piece Of The Endless Body Of The World Feeling Pleasures So Much Larger Than Skin And Bones And Blood.

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Love Won't Be Tampered With, Love Won't Go Away. Push It To One Side And It Creeps To The Other. Throw It In The Garbage And It Springs Up Clean. Try To Root It Out And It Only Flourishes. Love Is A Weed, A Dandelion That You Poison From Your Heart. The Taproots Wait. The Seeds Blow Off, Ticklish, Into A Part Of The Yard You Didn't Spray. And One Day, Though You Worked, Though You Prodded Out Each Spiky Leaf, You Lift Your Eyes And Dozens Of Fat Golden Faces Bob In The Grass.

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I Tried Out The Unfamiliar Syllables. They Fit. They Cracked In My Ears Like A Fist Through Ice.

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My Mind Ran Over Scenes Of Shesheeb Seducing Margaret Until I Was A Wagon Dragged By The Runaway Horses Of My Jealousy.

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I Don't Pray. When I Was Young, I Vowed I Never Would Be Caught Begging God. If I Want Something I Get It For Myself. I Go To Church Only To Show The Old Hens They Don't Get Me Down.

I Did Not Choose Solitude. Who Would? It Came On Me Like A Kind Of Vocation, Demanding An Effort That Married Women Can't Picture.

Our Songs Travel The Earth. We Sing To One Another. Not A Single Note Is Ever Lost And No Song Is Original. They All Come From The Same Place And Go Back To A Time When Only The Stones Howled.

Right And Wrong Were Shades Of Meaning, Not Sides Of A Coin.

There Are People Who Are Always, I Think, Going To Remain People Of The Book, To Use Another Author's Title, But People Of The Book, Who Really Must Be Around.

I Spend My Time Dwelling On Revenge And Try To Deal With The Monsters Crawling Out Of The Ashes.

We Started Dying Before The Snow, And Like The Snow, We Continued To Fall.

We Do Know That No One Gets Wise Enough To Really Understand The Heart Of Another, Though It Is The Task Of Our Life To Try.

You Never Know Where You're Going To Find The Same Thoughts In Another Brain, But When It Happens You Know It Right Off, Just Like You Were Connected By A Small Electrical Wire That Suddenly Glows Red Hot And Sparks.

I Think She Is Confused By The Way I Want Her, Which Is Like Nobody Else. I Know This Deep Down. I Want Her In A New Way, A Way She's Never Been Told About.

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Money Helps, Though Not So Much As You Think When You Don't Have It.

Society Is Like This Card Game Here, Cousin. We Got Dealt Our Hand Before We Were Even Born, And As We Grow We Have To Play As Best As We Can.

Don't Read Anything Except What Destroys The Insulation Between Yourself And Your Experience.

History Works Itself Out In The Living.

I Stood There In The Shadowed Doorway Thinking With My Tears. Yes, Tears Can Be Thoughts, Why Not?

He Despised His Body For Its Boring Hungers, Reflex Anger; Its Petty, Obliterating Rage. But Now He'd Become Detached. He Regarded His Body With A Tender Regret. It Was The Thing His Spirit Had To Haul.

When We Are Young, The Words Are Scattered All Around Us. As They Are Assembled By Experience, So Also Are We, Sentence By Sentence, Until The Story Takes Shape.

Women Don't Realize How Much Store Men Set On The Regularity Of Their Habits. We Absorb Their Comings And Goings Into Our Bodies, Their Rhythms Into Our Bones.

I Work Really Out Of Mythology, So Often I Work Out Of A Story That Has Remained Lodged Inside Somehow, Or I Work Out Of History, You Know, Out Of A Sense Of Historical Inevitability With Characters.

I Got Well By Talking. Death Could Not Get A Word In Edgewise, Grew Discouraged, And Traveled On.

Her Clothes Were Filled With Safety Pins And Hidden Tears.

The Universe Is Transformation.

I Can't Imagine A Home Without An Overflow Of Books. The Point Of Books Is To Have Way Too Many But To Always Feel You Never Have Enough, Or The Right One At The Right Moment, But Then Sometimes To Find You'd Longed To Fall Asleep Reading The Aspern Papers, And There It Is.

There Is A Legacy Of Violence Against Native Women That Has Gotten Worse And Worse Over Time.

But Then As Time Passed, I Learned The Lesson That Parents Do Early On. You Fail Sometimes. No Matter How Much You Love Your Children, There Are Times You Slip. There Are Moments You Can't Give, Stutter, Lose Your Temper, Or Simply Lose Face With The World, And You Can't Explain This To A Child.

He Had A Thousand-year-old Stare.

The Only Time I See The Truth Is When I Cross My Eyes.

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It Was Just Enough To Sit There Without Words.

It's Impossible To Write About Native Life Without Humor-that's How People Maintain Sanity.

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The Story Comes Around, Pushing At Our Brains, And Soon We Are Trying To Ravel Back To The Beginning, Trying To Put Families Into Order And Make Sense Of Things. But We Start With One Person, And Soon Another And Another Follows, And Still Another, Until We Are Lost In The Connections.

Every So Often Something Shatters Like Ice And We Are In The River Of Our Existence. We Are Aware.

People Forget The Good, Because The Bad Has More Punch.

It Is Easy To Take Away The World That We Think Is So Permanent And Reliable.

Where Was I?""a Different Island," Said Old Tallow. Her Voice Was Stern, But There Was An Ache In Her Look That Omakayas Had Never Before Seen. "an Island Called Spirit Island Where Everyone But You Died Of The Itching Sickness- You Were The Toughest One, The Littlest One, And You Survived Them All.""you Were Sent Here So You Could Save The Others," She Said. "because You'd Had The Sickness, You Were Strong Enough To Nurse Them Through It. They Did A Good Thing When They Took You In, And You Saved Them For Their Good Act. Now The Circle That Began When I Found You Is Complete.

I Knew Each Person's Delusion, The Places Their Records Had Scratched, Where The Sounds Repeated.

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Can You Stop Your Mother From Singing To You? Who Would Do Such A Thing?

The Internet, Which Seems Now So Embedded And Personal And Crucial To Our Lives, Isn't At All - We Really Shouldn't Think Of It That Way.

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As Soon As There's A Crisis, There Are People Who Take Charge And Want To Control Others. Climate-change Catastrophe And Human Migration And Immigration Are Great For Corporate And Governmental Control Over People, And We Have To Contend With That. I Should Say, I See Corporate Control Behind Everything That The Government Is Working On Right Now.

Here I Am, Where I Ought To Be. A Writer Must Have A Place Where He Or She Feels This, The Place To Love And Be Irritated With.

Women Are Strong, Strong, Terribly Strong. We Don't Know How Strong Until We're Pushing Out Our Babies.

All Through My Life I Never Did Believe In Human Measurement. Numbers, Time, Inches, Feet. All Are Just Ploys For Cutting Nature Down To Size. I Know The Grand Scheme Of The World Is Beyond Our Brains To Fathom, So I Don't Try, Just Let It In.

You Know, Some People Fall Right Through The Hole In Their Lives. Its Invisible, But They Come To It After Time, Never Knowing Where.

Ravens Are The Birds I'll Miss Most When I Die. If Only The Darkness Into Which We Must Look Were Composed Of The Black Light Of Their Limber Intelligence. If Only We Did Not Have To Die At All. Instead, Become Ravens.

What Is This Life But The Sound Of An Appalling Love.

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To Love Another Another Human In All Of Her Splendor And Imperfect Perfection , It Is A Magnificent Task...tremendous And Foolish And Human.

I Always Have Some Way Of Putting The Stories Together That Works For The Book. I've Always Switched Points Of View In My Books. I'm A Gemini.

Numbers, Time, Inches, Feet. All Are Just Ploys For Cutting Nature Down To Size.

When Women Age Into Their Power, No Wind Can Upset Them, No Hand Turn Aside Their Knowledge, No Fact Can Deflect Their Point Of View.

When Every Inch Of The World Is Known, Sleep May Be The Only Wilderness That We Have Left.

We Are Conjured Voiceless Out Of Nothing And Must Return To An Unknowing State. What Happens In Between Is An Uncontrolled Dance, And What We Ask For In Love Is No More Than A Momentary Chance To Get The Steps Right, To Move In Harmony Until The Music Stops.

Veils Of Love Which Was Only Hate Petrified By Longing--that Was Me.

I Might Not Be Able To Use The Word "hope," But I Could Certainly Use The Word "optimism." I'm Very Optimistic. I Don't Feel That It Helps To Be Pessimistic. At Some Point In My Life I Made A Conscious Decision That I Would Try To Be Optimistic - Not Blind To Anything At All - But To Always Hear The Way That Had The Best Chance For Happiness.

By Writing I Can Live In Ways That I Could Not Survive.

All Of Our Actions Have In Their Doing The Seed Of Their Undoing. ... That In Her Creation Of Her Children There Should Be The Unspeakable Promise Of Their Death, For By Their Birth She Had Created Mortal Beings.

...grandpa's Mind Had Left Us, Gone Wild And Wary. When I Walked With Him I Could Feel How Strange It Was. His Thoughts Swam Between Us, Hidden Under Rocks, Disappearing In Weeds, And I Was Fishing For Them, Dangling My Own Words Like Baits And Lures.

To Be Of Mixed Blood Is A Great Gift For A Writer. I Have One Foot On Tribal Lands And One Foot In Middle-class Life.

What Men Call Adventures Usually Consist Of The Stoical Endurance Of Appalling Daily Misery.

I Had A Very Free Childhood And Ranged Around On My Bicycle The Way Boys Do. I Had Few Restrictions.

The Music Was More Than Music - At Least What We Are Used To Hearing. The Music Was Feeling Itself. The Sound Connected Instantly With Something Deep And Joyous.

Be Lovely And Do No Harm.

This So Gnawed At Him On Some Nights That He Lay Awake Wondering Just How Many Unknown And Similarly Inconsequential Accidents And Bits Of Happenstance Were At This Moment Occurring Or Failing To Occur In Order To Ensure He Took His Next Breath, And The Next.

Death Is The Least Civilized Rite Of Passage.

There Will Never Come A Time When I Will Be Able To Resist My Emotions.

They Were So Strong In Their Beliefs That There Came A Time When It Hardly Mattered What Exactly Those Beliefs Were; They All Fused Into A Single Stubbornness.

I Truly Think That You Can't Go And Stalk Your Material, You Have To Leave The Door Open And Whatever Chooses You, Chooses You. You Can't Go And Wrestle It To The Ground.

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