Whispers
"Here on Little Blue in what would become Wisconsin there is a hilltop."
Prologue
"And so, with all nows tumbling and threading to an end in some ways too late and in others just in time, a series of trajectories convening to form a symphony of synchrony, I take you into the story of the fractured dream, a whisper from away."
Chapter 2: Sam's Hole
"The shake moves from his hands up his arms and into his torso. In his bulbous EVA suit, he looks like a wiggling white leaf, a blurring ghost."
Theme: Etuaptmumk
(Two-Eyed Seeing)
"Two-Eyed Seeing refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing and to using both of these eyes together.” (Bartlett, Marshall, & Marshall, 2012, p. 335).
Chapter 7: Fires Map
"Do you think they are not only spirits but something else too?"
"Like what?"
"Like fires."
Theme: Hoops
“I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”
Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk),
Wičháša Wakȟáŋ of the Oglala Sioux Nation, Black Elk Speaks
Chapter 2: Sam's Hole
Hand on her womb, Maya murmurs,
“Where’d you go?”
as Sam races through a rust-red cave,
61 million kilometers from home.
Chapter 5: Little Sister
“You doin’ what you’re called to. When you go flying on a spaceship, you don’t run off in a line but an arc or even a curly cue, like you’re tying a knot with light. Gotta follow the arc even though you can never see its end. A bit of math and faith is all you got. Everything is always orbiting something. And that something gets pulled and pulls back. You been pulled, Emria. I don’t recommend pulling back. Ain’t no good ever come from burying a buzzin’ and warm dream such as you’ve had all these years.”
Theme: Sonder
“The realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.”
John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows