The Overstory: A Novel

Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.

Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation.

“Patience is the maker of all good things.”