Sandal Tree Quotes

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass. - The Two Trees

I am wild, I will sing to the trees, I will sing to the stars in the sky, I love, I am loved, he is mine, Now at last I can die! I am sandaled with wind and with flame, I have heart-fire and singing to give, I can tread on the grass or the stars, Now at last I can live!

Ohh,' said the girl with a sad tilt of her head. It was a response Sejal would hear a lot in the following weeks and which she would eventully come to understand meant, 'Ohh, India, that must be so hard for you, and I know because I read this book over the summer called The Fig Tree (which is actually set in Pakistan but I don't realize there's a difference) about a girl whose parents sell her to a sandal maker because everyone's poor and they don't care about girls there, and I bet that's why you're in our country even, and now everyone's probably being mean to you just because of 9/11, but not me although I'll still be watching you a little too closely on the bus later because what if you're just here to kill Americans?' There was a lot of information encoded in that one vowel sound, so Sejal missed most of it at first.

I am wild, I will sing to the trees,    I will sing to the stars in the sky,   I love, I am loved, he is mine,    Now at last I can die! I am sandaled with wind and with flame,    I have heart-fire and singing to give,   I can tread on the grass or the stars,    Now at last I can live!

She raises her hands to the sky and breathes it in, she starts spinning, enjoying the feel and energy of this Africa. She floats, her long skirt swaying with the dry grass in the breeze with her spirals, her sandaled feet covered in dust. She is part of Africa. She has never felt so free and happy.

Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It's the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it's closed. We're watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun beings to set. It's a perfect afternoon.

I undressed to climb a tree; my naked thighs embraced the smooth and humid bark; my sandals climbed upon the branches. High up, but still beneath the leaves and shaded from the heat, I straddled a wide-spread fork and swung my feet into the void. It had rained. Drops of water fell and flowed upon my skin. My hands were soiled with the moss and my heels were reddened by the crushed blossoms. I felt the lovely tree living when the wind passed through it; so I locked my legs tighter, and crushed my open lips to the hairy nape of a bough.

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

Zane turned his attention to the bus. Phoebe got a bad feeling when she caught sight of the worn sandals, tie-dyed T-shirts and woven hats on the next couple to disembark. “Hey,” the man said. “I’m Martin Lagarde and this is my wife, Andrea.” The woman, a thirtysomething brunette with freckles and glasses, shook hands with Zane. “We’re so excited to be here. Martin and I just love being in the outdoors. We’ve hiked all over, and last year we did a week at a meditation retreat in Hawaii, but we’ve never done anything like this.” She continued to pump his hand as her expression turned earnest. “We really want this opportunity to be one with the land. To experience a different kind of life. The Old West.” She finally released Zane’s hand. “We’re vegetarians. I hope that won’t be a problem.” Zane considered them for a moment, then said, “Not for me.” He jerked his head toward the compartment beneath the bus that the driver had opened. “Collect your gear and head inside. Chase will show you where you’ll bunk tonight.” “Sure thing,” Martin said. He held up his hand for a high five. When Zane simply stared at him, Martin grabbed Zane’s wrist and pulled it until it was level with his shoulder, then slapped his hand against Zane’s. When he walked away, Zane turned to look at her. “Two starving kids and tree-hugging vegetarians. I’m going to kill Chase.

A President J.G., F.C. who said he wasn’t going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for us. Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show. Who handled wild applause from camouflage-fatigue- and sandal-and-poncho-clad C.U.S.P.s with the unabashed grace of a real pro. Who had black hair and silver sideburns, just like his big-headed puppet, and the dusty brick-colored tan seen only among those without homes and those whose homes had a Dermalatix Hypospectral personal sterilization booth. Who declared that neither Tax & Spend nor Cut & Borrow comprised the ticket into a whole new millennial era (here more puzzlement among the Inaugural audience, which Mario represents by having the tiny finger-puppets turn rigidly toward each other and then away and then toward). Who alluded to ripe and available Novel Sources of Revenue just waiting out there, unexploited, not seen by his predecessors because of the trees (?). Who foresaw budgetary adipose trimmed with a really big knife. The Johnny Gentle who stressed above all—simultaneously pleaded for and promised—an end to atomized Americans’ fractious blaming of one another for our terrible 151 internal troubles. Here bobs and smiles from both wealthily green-masked puppets and homeless puppets in rags and mismatched shoes and with used surgical masks, all made by E.T.A.’s fourth- and fifth-grade crafts class, under the supervision of Ms. Heath, of match-sticks and Popsicle-stick shards and pool-table felt with sequins for eyes and painted fingernail-parings for smiles/frowns, under their masks. The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to. And he promises to eat light and sleep very little until he finds them—in the Ukraine, or the Teutons, or the wacko Latins. Or—pausing with that one arm up and head down in the climactic Vegas way—closer to right below our nose. He swears he’ll find us some cohesion-renewing Other. And then make some tough choices. Alludes to a whole new North America for a crazy post-millennial world.

I'd read the section in my guidebook about the trail's history the winter before, but it wasn't until now—a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat—that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who'd created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they'd been imagining me. It didn't matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That's what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

arrived in the company of two enormous white women whose bodies were dual masses of rolling, dimpled flesh. Fat spilled over their knees, and their stomachs fell like heavy sacks of birdseed, covering their vaginas and hanging halfway down their thighs. Legs like tree trunks led straight into sandals with no mention of ankle or discernible calf.

But she did have a sulky bursting prowling sort of energy, because she was in that state so many young girls go through―a state of sexual obsession that can be like a sort of trance. When I was fifteen, still living in Baker Street with my father, I spent some months in that state, so that now I can't walk through that area without remembering, half amused, half embarrassed, an emotional condition which was so strong it had the power to absorb into it pavements, houses, shop windows. What was interesting about June was this: surely nature should have arranged matters so that the men she met must be aware of what afflicted her. Not at all. That first evening Maryrose and I involuntarily exchanged glances and nearly laughed out loud from recognition and amused pity. We did not, because we also understood that the so obvious fact was not obvious to the men and we wanted to protect her from their laughter. All the women in the place were aware of June. I remember sitting one morning on the verandah with Mrs. Lattimer, the pretty red-haired woman who flirted with young Stanley Lett, and June came into sight prowling blindly under the gum-trees by the railway lines. It was like watching a sleepwalker. She would take half a dozen steps, staring across the valley at the piled blue mountains, lift her hands to her hair, so that her body, tightly outlined in bright red cotton, showed every straining line and the sweat patches dark under the armpits―then drop her arms, her fists clenched at her sides. She would stand motionless, then walk on again, pause, seem to dream, kick at the cinders with the toe of high white sandal, and so on, slowly, till she was out of sight beyond the sun-glittering gum-trees. Mrs. Lattimore let out a deep rich sigh, laughed her weak indulgent laugh, and said: 'My God, I wouldn't be a girl again for a million pounds. My God, to go through all that again, not for a million million.' And Maryrose and I agreed. Yet, although to us every appearance of this girl was so powerfully embarrassing, the men did not see it and we took care not to betray her. There is a female chivalry, woman for woman, as strong as any other kind of loyalty. Or perhaps it was we didn't want brought home to us the deficiencies of imagination of our own men.

She understood that becoming a nun was a lifetime commitment. Testing her daughter’s resolve was wise. The Koehler family together, 1923 First Homes As an adult, I visited Rosie’s first home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, to get a sense of her early life and that of her famous family. The compact Victorian residence stands three stories tall on a small lot in the Boston suburb. It was easy to picture the young Kennedy children playing in the back yard. Rose Kennedy wrote in Times to Remember, her 1974 autobiography: “It was a nice old wooden-frame house with clapboard siding; seven rooms, plus two small ones in the converted attic, all on a small lot with a few bushes and trees . . . about twenty-five minutes from the center of the city by trolley.” 5 The family home on Beals Street is now the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service. From the deep browns and reds of the rugs on the hardwood floors to the homey couch and chairs, the home felt warm and comfortable to me. I suppressed a desire to kick off my sandals and flop on the sofa. The Kennedys’ house on Beals Street, Rosie’s first home But my perspective as a child would have triggered a different impression. I would have whispered to my mother, “They’re rich!” (I’ve since discovered that money isn’t the only measure of wealth. There’s wealth in memories, too.) A lovely grand piano occupies one corner of the Kennedys’ old living room. It was a wedding gift to Rose Kennedy from her uncles, and she delighted in playing her favorite song, “Sweet Adeline,” on it. Although her children took piano lessons, Mrs. Kennedy lamented that her own passion never ignited a similar spark in any of her daughters. She did often ask Rosemary to perform, however. I see an image of Rosemary declaring she couldn’t, her hands stretching awkwardly across the keys. But her mother encouraged Rosie to practice, confident she’d

The summer sun glowed on the white clapboards, which were in desperate need of a coat of paint. The air was sweet with the scents of salt water and a jumble of untended rosebushes in riotous bloom along one side of the house. The garden was vivid with greenery, though it seemed all the plants had grown into a tangled mass. Rich, well-dug black soil showed here and there. I looked over my shoulder and saw an aging apple orchard at the end of an empty field and beyond it an enticing glimpse of sapphire water. "Is that Hood Canal?" Will followed my gaze. "Yes!" He jumped down from the porch and started back to the garden gate. "Let's go see it." My sandals weren't the best shoes for tramping through the long grass of the field or for navigating the root-choked earth beneath the apple trees. I had to slip-slide my way down the cut in the bank to the gravelly beach beside the canal. There was no wind, and the smooth water glistened like satin.

Scarlet! It is the first color I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the color, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight. Poppy. The magic of saying the word made my skin prickle, the saying almost a greater miracle than the seeing. I was drunk with joy. I danced. I shouted. Imagine the astonishment of my friends at Rome to see our cynical metropolitan poet, who barely knows a flower or a tree, dancing about in broken sandals on the earth, which is baked hard and cracked in some places, and in others puddled with foul-smelling mud- to see him dancing and singing to himself in celebration of this bloom. Poppy, scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind. Scarlet. Magic word on the tongue to flash again on the eye. Scarlet.

Oh, she says gravely, when a bell chimes or a phone rings, we simply take the opportunity to switch off and abandon all our plans and emotions - all our thoughts about other people and ourselves. Abandon all our human perceptions? I ask indignantly. In that case, what’s left for us? No, she says with a shake of the head, I only mean our conception of the world. I like the way she pronounces the word ‘conception’ in her Dutch accent, as if it were hot and she might burn her lips on it. I wish I could speak a foreign language as fluently as you do, I tell her. Please say ‘conception’ again. Explain it to me. What’s the difference between my perceptions and my conceptions? Resolutely, she makes for a cafe beneath some plane trees whose leaves are casting decorative shadows on the white tablecloths. She sits down and regards me sceptically, as if gauging whether I’m bright enough to merit an answer. Most of the time, she says, we form an opinion about things without really perceiving them. She points to an elderly woman waddling across the square laden down with plastic bags. For instance, she goes on, I look at that woman and I think, How bow-legged she is, and that skirt! A ghastly colour and far too short for her. No one should wear short skirts at that age. Are my own legs still good enough for short skirts? I used to have a blue skirt myself. Where is it, I wonder? I wish I was wearing that blue skirt myself. Where is it, I wonder? I wish I was wearing that blue skirt right now. But if I looked like that woman there... She props her head on her hands and regard me with a twinkle in her eye. I laugh. I haven’t really ‘perceived’ the woman, she says, I’ve merely pondered on skirts and legs and the ageing process. I’m a prisoner of my own ideas - my conceptions, in other words. See what I mean? I say yes, but I’d say yes to a whole host of things when she looks at me that way. A waitress of Franka’s age takes our order. She’s wearing a white crocheted sweater over her enormous breasts and a white apron tightly knotted around her prominent little tummy. Her platform-soled sandals, which are reminiscent of hoofs, give her a clumsy, foal-like appearance. Now it’s your turn, says Antje. French teenager, I say. Probably bullied into passing up an apprenticeship and working in her parents’ cafe. Dreams of being a beautician. No, Antje protests, that won’t do. You must say what’s really going through your head. I hesitate. Come on, do. I sigh. Please, she says. OK, but I take no responsibility for my thoughts. Deal! Sexy little mam’selle, I say. Great boobs, probably an easy lay, wouldn’t refuse a few francs for a new sweater. She’d be bound to feel good and holler Maintenant, viens! That song of Jane Birkin’s, haven’t heard it for years. I wonder what Jane Birkin’s doing these days. She used to be the woman of my dreams. Still, I’m sure that girl doesn’t like German men, and besides, I could easily be her father, I’ve got a daughter her age. I wonder what my daughter’s doing at this moment... I dry up. Phew, I say. Sorry, that was my head, not me. Antje nods contentedly. She leans back so her plaits dangle over the back of the chair. Nothing torments us worse than our heads, she says, closing her eyes. You’ve got to hand it to the Buddhists, they’ve got the knack of switching off. It’s simply wonderful.

Fern Canyon smelled primeval, of the aerosol of waterfalls and the green earthiness of moss soft enough to trick naïve travelers into taking off their boots and sandals, unaware of the smooth rocks slick with river slime. The fallen trees served as handrails for people following their bliss by almost breaking their tailbones.

Nevertheless they all insisted upon calling me Moscarda still, although the name Moscarda surely held for everyone a different signification than before; and it seems to me they might have spared that poor nobody of a pauper, as he stood there smilingly in his wooden sandals and his sky-blue blouse, the pain of having to turn around once again at the sound of that name, as if it really belonged to him. No name. No memory today of yesterday's name; of today's name tomorrow. If the name is the thing, if a name in us is the concept of everything that is situated without us, if without a name there is no concept, and the thing remains blindly indistinct and undefined within us, very well, then let man take that name which I once bore and engrave it as an epitaph on the brow of that pictured me that they beheld; let them leave it there in peace, and let them not speak of it again. For a name is no more than that, an epitaph. Something befitting the dead. One who has reached a conclusion. I am alive, and I reach no conclusion. Life knows no conclusion. Nor does it know anything of names. This tree, tremulous breathing of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow, book or breeze; the book I read, the breeze I drink in. Living wholly without, a vagabond.

Until this night, this awful night, he’d had a little joke about himself. He didn’t know who he was, or where he’d come from, but he knew what he liked. And what he liked was all around him-the flower stands on the corners, the big steel and glass buildings filled with milky evening light, the trees, of course, the grass beneath his feet. And the telephones-it didn’t matter. He liked to figure them out, master them, then crush them into tiny hard multicolored balls which he could then juggle or toss through plate glass windows when nobody was about. He liked piano music, the motion pictures, and the poems he found in books. He also liked the automobiles that burnt oil from the earth like lamps. And the great jet planes that flew on the same scientific principles, above the clouds. He always stopped and listened to the people laughing and talking up there when one of the people laughing and talking up there when one of the planes flew overhead. Driving was an extraordinary pleasure. In a silver Mercedes-Benz, he had sped on smooth empty roads from Rome to Florence to Venice in one night. He also liked television-the entire electric process of it, with tiny bits of lights. How soothing it was to have the company of the television, the intimacy with so many artfully painted faces speaking to you in friendship from the glowing screen. The rock and roll, he liked that too. He liked the music. He liked the Vampire Lestat singing “Requiem for the Marquise”. He didn’t pay attention to the words much. It was the melancholy and the dark undertone of drums and cymbals. Made him want to dance. He liked the giant yellow machines that dug into the earth late at night in the big cities with men in uniforms, crawling all over them; he liked the double-decker buses of London, and the people-the clever mortals everywhere-he liked, too, of course. He liked walking in Damascus during the evening, and seeing in sudden flashes of disconnected memory the city of the ancients. Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians in these streets. He liked the libraries where he could find photographs of ancient monuments in big smooth good-smelling books. He took his own photographs of the new cities around him and sometimes he could put images on those pictures which came from his thoughts. For example, in his photograph of Rome there were Roman people in tunics and sandals superimposed upon the modern versions in their thick ungraceful clothes. Oh, yes, much to like around him always-the violin music of Bartók, little girls in snow white dresses coming out of the church at midnight having sung at the Christmas mass. He liked the blood of his victims too, of course. That went without saying. It was no part of his little joke. Death was not funny to him. He stalked his prey in silence; he didn’t want to know his victims. All a mortal had to do was speak to him and he was turned away. Not proper, as he saw it, to talk to these sweet, soft-eyed things and then gobble their blood, break their bones and lick the marrow, squeeze their limbs to dripping pulp. And that was the way he feasted now, so violently. He felt no great need for blood anymore; but he wanted it. And the desire overpowered him in all its ravening purity, quite apart from the thirst. He could have feasted upon three or four mortals a night.