I like to play this game, after reading a good book, in
which I ask myself, if this book were the only surviving document in some
post-apocalyptic or future time, and otherworldly visitors, or a rogue team of
anthropologists emerging from a sub-mountain recluse, were to study it, what
would they learn about our society?
I think, after reading Eating the Heart First, they’d
learn that human beings are able to be both felled and redeemed, over and over,
by the love we carry. That we can suffer immeasurable losses and our love will
only grow. That we revere our planet, our towns and cities, our backyards, and
that we recognize that the cyclical qualities of the natural world parallel and
are tied to the seasons of our emotional and spiritual evolution.
And lastly, they’d learn that we need to write so that such
seemingly reckless loving and living make sense.
