Chapter 4 - The Garden of Apathy

Weeds

She woke up from her garden dream, late. There was no one around to prompt or chide her, so Cimmy assumed they have all gone out into the fields, but one quick look out the window informed her that everybody was still there. That wasn’t the only thing she saw. The world had shifted again, and she was in a different place now, a garden without walls.

Far out into the distance, she could see the waters Rahima was talking about, ending into nothing, as if they were falling off the earth.

She looked around the room to see if Fay was still there, and he was, dozing off on its bed of straw.She couldn’t put her finger on it, but had this strange sense of futility, as if everything worth doing and knowing had already been experienced.

Given her special circumstances that was a weirdly unreasonable feeling to have, because, for all she knew, she could wake up the next day to find herself in a completely different world, and still, the garden felt dull all of a sudden, and very small, now that she could gaze upon the vast expanse of the fields beyond it.

They were beautiful, those fields by the waters, just as Rahima had said, with their dense clumps of evergreens whose colors faded to blue and to gray into the distance, and with their endless wild meadows dotted by the bright splotches of poppies and chicory.

She wondered what would happen if she stepped beyond the boundary, now invisible, that separated their cultures from the wilderness, an endeavor which looked quite easy to accomplish now, because it didn’t seem like anybody would even notice she was gone.

“What on earth happened?” Cimmy asked herself, apprehensive of this strange apathy that suffused her surroundings.

She tried to talk to Rahima, who was too busy with her chores to notice her, and after she passed by a few other groups of people who also didn’t seem to acknowledge her presence, she had this sudden feeling that she must have become invisible.

Invisibility, Cimmy thought, could be beneficial on occasion, for instance when Bertha and Josepha managed to find her at any time, and grab her from whatever activity she was involved in to impose their will on her day, but it could be heartbreaking too, when even her best friend didn’t seem to notice her presence anymore.

She remembered that Rahima had toiled for many miserable days as a result of her wall obsession and gave her friend the benefit of the doubt, if only to realize a second later that the Rahima she was thinking about never existed in the current setting.

“So much for guilt,” Cimmy thought. “Or friendship, or anything else, for that matter.”

For a second she contemplated the fact that maybe God had brought her here, in this ever changing world where she didn’t belong, to punish her for the audacity of wanting a better life by means of random and unpredictable reality shifts.

She wallowed in self-pity for a while, until she remembered the bitter roots, and the cracked dirt, and almost dying from hunger, and had to agree that if this reality skipping game was meant as a punishment, it didn’t exactly accomplish the goal.

The fields were heavy with harvest, displaying an overabundance of produce: vegetables and grains, fruit trees and weeds, all growing together aggressively, in giant amorphous clumps inside which one couldn’t distinguish their beginnings or ends.

Heartened by her new outlook on life, Cimmy put Fay in her pocket and, still worried that somebody might see her breach the boundary and punish her, she made for the meadows.

Despite her unspoken fears, the world didn’t disappear the moment she stepped over the invisible line where the wall used to be; how strange it was, she thought, to remember a wall that never existed, and remember it in all its details, with Rahima straddling the top of it no less.

The meadow grasses were thicker and softer, nothing like the fields of grains Cimmy was used to, and tall, reaching up to her waist.

She waddled through them like through murky water, wary of the things that might lurk underneath, wondering what on earth she was doing there and still dumbfounded by the fact that the limits of her world, as she knew them, had ceased to exist.

She was immediately terrified of the new boundary, the one she could see in the distance, that place where the waters fell off the earth into only God knew what.

The water was very close now, preceded by a stretch of loose dirt which glimmered softly in the sunlight, and its large restless mass overwhelmed Cimmy, who had never seen so much water in one place before.

A weed wrapped itself around her ankle as she fought her way out of the meadow to approach the waters; its green rope dotted with tiny white flowers made her stumble. When she stopped to free herself from it, Cimmy looked across the field and was shocked to discover how tiny her village had become. She counted its miniature houses, which looked like toys now, and was flooded by an overwhelming sense of dread: more than half of the houses were gone. Furthermore, she noticed that it wasn’t just the water which seemed to be falling off the edge of existence, but the earth itself had vanished on the opposite side, and all the familiar surroundings that lay on top of it and which used to be her home had fallen into the abyss, never to be seen again.

Now Cimmy knew she was being punished. She curled up on the stretch of loose dirt next to the big waters and cried there for a long time. She cried the loss of everything she knew, her best friend, her family, even Josepha, strange as that may seem. She started wondering what she was going to do from now on, when an even more terrifying thought surfaced: what if, because she had ventured so close to the edge, the world gave way under her feet and she was hurled into the abyss too? Cimmy instinctively looked for something to hold on to, so she wouldn’t fall, but the soft tall grasses of the meadow didn’t look like they would offer much support.

She remembered Fay, crushed by the guilt of having to watch him share her bitter fate when they both got swallowed by the depths unknown, and knew it was her fault for bringing him here, in this land of dragons, to meet his end before his time.

It never occurred to Cimmy, in her distress, that the place of safety from where she’d supposedly taken the rat was now gone, and if anything, she had rescued it from disaster, but such is the nature of guilt and shame, they do not listen to reason.

The rat, on the other hand, didn’t seem flustered, despite the fact that, as Cimmy knew, animals have a keener sense of danger than humans; the girl expected him to be restless and utter anguished shrieks in expectation of the end of the world, but no. The rat yawned, bored, squirmed about a little in search of tasty crumbs to eat, and then, disappointed he had found none, ran back into the meadows.

Finding a rat in a wild meadow is about as hard as finding a needle in a haystack, a metaphor Cimmy was more familiar with, but she was determined to find Fay, who was, after all, the only thing she had left now that her world was lost to the abyss.

She combed through the meadows, far and wide, in search of her little pet, with total disregard for her safety, ready to risk everything to find him, and she did find him, eventually, in a small clearing in the meadow, gorging on ripe grass seeds. There she looked across the field again, and discovered with awe that her village, now complete and significantly larger than before, was back in its place. Everything seemed to be there, just as she remembered it; she started crying again, now for joy, that divinity in its mercy had deigned to forgive her and put the world back together the way it was.

She picked up Fay and rushed back home, to the village which miraculously grew larger the closer she got to it, so happy and relieved to be able to go back where she was safe, that she didn’t stop to contemplate the logic of her circumstances: if the village could be gone in one instant and back the next, there was no guarantee this wasn’t going to happen again, whether she was inside it or not, which placed the certainty of existence itself in doubt going forward.

When she finally got back home, she was hungry and tired, and emotionally drained from all the crying, and scared, and a little loopy, a blend that to Josepha looked no different from Cimmy’s usual expression.

The former was in a good mood and welcomed the girl with her usual banter.

“Well, if it isn’t Princess Lazybones who decided to grace us with her presence after a long, exhausting day at the beach. Your preciousness must be hungry from all of that laying in the sun doing nothing! Wait, let me fetch somebody to peel some grapes for you!”

It is interesting how life changes one’s perspective on things.

In the chill of the evening, as she cozied up next to the fire pit at the center of the village, close to Rahima, Cimmy thought the mere fact that she was still able to hear Josepha’s voice was a gift from above, and she started tearing up again, this time because of gratitude.

“Oh, would you stop your crying, for once? Every time I look at you, you’re crying about something! If you don’t stop right now, I’ll give you something to cry about! Useless lunatic!” Josepha retorted.

People who cried irritated her, because she found the habit to create unnecessary awkwardness and saw it as a sign of a weak mind and loose personal discipline.

“Why are you crying, Cimmy?” Rahima whispered in her friend’s ear, genuinely puzzled by the latter’s emotional outburst.

Cimmy didn’t answer, she just took in Rahima’s familiar countenance, now overshadowed by worry, and in that instant she found her friend to be the most beautiful creature God saw fit to place upon this earth.

Another wave of tears drenched the lap of her garment.

“I...just...,” she barely managed to utter between sighs, “am so happy to see you again!”

Rahima gave her a long, probing look, shook her head, and mumbled under her breath.

“You know, sometimes I wonder if Josepha isn’t right about you. You’re so weird you’re even giving me the creeps.”

---

The Good Herbs

Early in the morning, the elders had convened to discuss important things that needed done in the village, and in such situations, the youngsters were encouraged to make themselves scarce and not linger under foot to be in everyone’s way.

Cimmy in particular was eager to oblige and get lost in one of her unsanctioned activities, grateful not to have to explain herself and wallow through the unavoidable chastising that followed.

In this instance, she gathered her courage and went out to explore the outer limits again.

It is strange the way the mind works: meanwhile she had learned about the horizon and the curvature of the earth, a concept very hard to grasp in the face of seemingly contradicting evidence, but her heart was still pounding like a drum out of fear she would lose her village again, and listened to its own worries, justifiable or not.

The creatures of the wilderness had cut a dirt path through the tall grasses of the meadows, a path she decided to follow, just to see where it led.

“There is nothing here,” she told herself, trying to chase away the disappointment engendered by the unremarkable nature of the world beyond.

Ever since she had set her mind on finding out what that world looked like, she had imagined it a thousand times, and in her mind’s eye it was always miraculous, unearthly and extraordinary.

It had living waters, and treasures beyond belief, and even, at some point, she fantasized that once she got past the wall, immortality awaited her there.

“Is it all like that?” Cimmy continued her inner musing. “Do we all yearn and strive and dream and hope our whole lives to reach someplace or something that inevitably disappoints?”

In all fairness, the world beyond the walls was lovelier than anyone could expect, with its lush green meadows and endless waters, filled with an abundance of plants and wildlife Cimmy had never seen before, but she ignored them all, bogged down in her own drama, impervious to change and curiosity.

“Why am I even here? What is there to do here? It’s not like I haven’t seen weeds before,” she continued her brooding, looking around for anything out of the ordinary and getting more morose by the minute under the warm sun that made the flowers sparkle like giant gemstones and threw gleams and shimmers on the open waters. “Maybe Josepha is right. I’m pretty sure that’s what useless looks like. No wonder they never stop getting on my case. This is dumb.”

It is a law of nature that discovery always stumbles upon the discoverer.

You can look for something for twenty years, you can give it all of your attention, all of your love, every minute and every breath, and you will come up with nothing, thin air, while the entire world laughs out loud at the haughty fairytale that so evidently eludes you.

You will be derided, counseled, disapproved of, until whatever crumble of dignity you have left is completely gone.

Then and only then, when your spirit is so heavy with public scorn and a deep sense of failure and ridicule that you can’t look at yourself in the mirror without averting your eyes, that discovery, that prized quest you’ve dedicated your life to, sneaks up on you, so different from your expectations you can’t even recognize it, and you will avoid it like the plague, loathed to touch it, until fate has to literally beat you over the head with it.

Cimmy hadn’t yet arrived to this breakthrough moment, hers wasn’t discouragement, or a deep sense of failure, or even that surreal feeling of seeing everything you valued about your life slip through your fingers and dissipate, because one can’t rush fate, and it wasn’t her time.

She got boggled in the weeds in her garden of apathy, searching for something else, for something different, while failing to see the treasure in front of her eyes.

You don’t recognize treasure you haven’t seen before, because treasure is a social construct, not an intrinsic quality, otherwise every single one of us would constantly be in awe of every drop of rain.

Her social conditioning had always informed her that weeds were useless, just something that gave her more work to do and took precious space that could be used for crops. What did it matter if their roots looked like gold threads or their flowers were bluer than the sky?

In her absentmindedness she stumbled on a long and tangled stem that, given her current state of mind, she ruminated had been placed in her path on purpose, just to make her fall.

She was so upset she didn’t even get up from the ground, mad at existence in general and at her crashed dreams of a paradisaic garden in particular, and she stood there, sulking and refusing to acknowledge the scrape on her arm, which was slowly soaking the hard dirt beneath it with the slow drip of her blood.

“Great!” Cimmy restarted her ranting, exasperated. “That’s just great! Of all places to get hurt, it had to happen here, where I can’t find a rag to dress the wound! What am I going to tie this with? Weeds? Worthless waste of space they are, too!”

The village was too far away, otherwise she would have run back to find said rag and stop the bleeding, but in her current state she simply didn’t feel that it was worth the effort. The scrape was stubborn and wouldn’t stop bleeding, which was insufferably annoying, like all things in this life that you hope would end all by themselves but don’t.

“Yeah, now I have to worry about this stupid scrape. Oh, what’s the use!” she continued mumbling to herself, while Fay was staring at her with little beady eyes, confused about the drama. “Bleed out for all I care!” she cursed her wound, which refused to cooperate.

A subsequent assessment of the injury made her change her mind, so, still fuming mad, she started looking around for something she could use as a dressing.

The field answered her quest by graciously bringing to the forefront a variety of broadleaved natives, of which she picked one that looked sturdy enough, wrapped one of its large leaves around her arm and tied it with the dastardly stem she’d stumbled upon in the first place.

It took some effort to do it, too, because the sap vessels inside the stem were very long and almost impossible to break. She wrapped her arm the best she could and grabbed a handful of green twine for the trip back to the village, just in case her dressing came undone. She didn’t even notice the bright indigo flowers that were still attached to the long unyielding stems, and whose petals got ruthlessly crushed in the process.

“What’s that?” Bertha asked, a crease between her eyebrows at the sight of blood. She was always furious with the children if they happened to get hurt, the main reason Cimmy had learned to tend to her bumps and scrapes all by herself and let no one else be the wiser. “You can’t help getting yourself into trouble, can you?” Bertha started the attack. “Do you think we have time to tend to your fever if that cut starts poisoning your blood?” she pointed to the offending arm, accusingly. “If that wound turns foul, I’ll let you rot!” she threatened. “Let me see! And you put that dirty leaf on it, too! I swear, sometimes I wonder if God doesn’t try to do the village a favor by getting rid of the likes of you!” she grabbed Cimmy’s arm and removed the improvised dressing on it before the girl had time to protest. The cut had completely closed and a sturdy scab was forming on top of the wound, to guarantee that no dirt was going to get into her blood and make it foul.

“How did you...” Bertha mumbled, confused, used as she was to see these kinds of incidents take a turn for the worse really fast. She examined the wound, which didn’t show any signs that it needed additional attention, and dropped Cimmy’s arm, half annoyed, half relieved. “I guess nobody can say the almighty wasn’t fair to you: He didn’t bless you with any brains, but dumped a load of luck on top of your head to make up for it. Now go, you’re keeping me from my business!” She turned around to leave, but changed her mind. “What in heavens is that mess on your shirt?” she pointed at Cimmy’s garment, which had turned bright blue in places, where the crushed indigo flowers had touched it. “Don’t hope for another shirt. This one was brand new. If you can’t wash off those stains, you’ll have to wear it like that.”

Cimmy washed it repeatedly for the next several days, but the blue was there to stay. In light of the disaster du jour, Cimmy had another heretical thought, the kind that had reliably gotten her in trouble since she had started taking her first steps into the world. A shirt that was stained blue was not acceptable, but if she managed to make the entire shirt blue, that would probably be alright. She wasn’t given to situational analysis, and therefore she did not contemplate the impact of being the only person with a blue shirt in a village full of tan ones, so she went back out into the field and picked a large bundle of the weeds with blue flowers, took them home and boiled them together with her shirt. Problem solved.

She was surprised to find a knotted bundle of threads at the bottom of the pot after she threw away the blue water, threads a lot softer and silkier than the scratchy thistle fibers her shirt was made of, and they were all bright blue, like the sky and the waters, and looked so beautiful that they didn’t seem to belong to this world.

There were no such colors and such softness in her world, and while looking at them and feeling their softness caress her fingers, she wondered whether she didn’t actually venture into that dream world of hers after all.

She spent all afternoon removing the bits of woody stem still stuck in the wondrous fibers, and then she unraveled the knots and split the sturdy bundles into thinner and thinner threads, until they were lighter than the breeze and so thin she could barely see them.

When she was done, she ended up with a lot of thread, so she stretched it on the loom and made a piece of cloth out of it, finer than gossamer and lighter than the breeze, a cloth whose color seemed to have been drawn directly from the sky.

Cimmy didn’t know what to do with something so beautiful, and feared she might tear the fabric if she tried to use it for a garment, so she wrapped it delicately around her head, unable to resist the impulse to show it off.

“More pointless things, I see.” Josepha admonished her at the sight of the sky blue gossamer weave. “So help me, girl, what did you do to your shirt?” she giggled as she noticed the shirt’s color. “At least that saves me the energy of having to look for you whenever you wander off into whatever la-la land you waste your time in. We can see you from the moon in that shirt.”

---

To Heal

Are you sure it was the leaf?” Rahima asked, while stirring the pot of blue liquid to get the color evenly distributed through the fibers.

“I don’t know.” Cimmy scratched her head, unconvinced. “Maybe. It’s hard to tell.” She frowned and changed her mind. “What else could it be?”

“But why would placing a leaf on your wound make it better?” Rahima asked. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know, I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” Cimmy pondered, working through her logical explanation out loud.

“Maybe some of the plant’s substance fused into my skin,” she said tentatively.

“That’s crazy talk, even for you,” Rahima shook her head, appalled. “There,” she grabbed onto her friend’s arm and held on to it. “Am I leaving part of my substance in your arm, too?”

Cimmy thoughtfully considered her answer.

“You are not actually going to answer that, are you?” Rahima protested, exasperated.

“Why would that be so hard to believe?” Cimmy asked, puzzled at the reaction.

“Because it’s crazy,” Rahima stated the obvious.

“Maybe it only works with leaves,” Cimmy walked back her hypothesis.

“Maybe it doesn’t work at all,” Rahima returned the more plausible response.

“Maybe not,” Cimmy relented.

They watched the pot in silence, stirring occasionally to prevent the color from settling on the bottom.

Cimmy eventually burst out.

“But, say, if it were possible, wouldn’t you want to try it? What’s it going to hurt? It’s not like you’re not hurt already!”

“Maybe I don’t want to spend three weeks delirious, hoping I don’t die from the fever. Who knows how those leaves might foul up your blood?” Rahima asked, concerned.

“How would they foul up my blood?” Cimmy continued the flow of logic.

“With whatever they might get inside your wound?”

“So you’re saying they can blend some of their essence into my blood?” Cimmy picked up the logical dissonance.

“Yes! No!” Rahima got all turned around inside her head. “You don’t understand!”

“How don’t I understand?” Cimmy continued, unrelenting. “Either it lends its essence to your blood or it doesn’t.”

“It’s not that simple,” Rahima protested. “We do know things that can turn your blood foul, but we do not know things that can heal your wound.”

“What’s the difference?” Cimmy went on, unperturbed.

“For one, I’ve seen blood turn foul. I haven’t seen a wound healed by a leaf.”

“Until now,” Cimmy corrected her.

“Until now,” Rahima agreed in principle. “If that’s what happened, that is.”

“What else could it be?” Cimmy restarted the logical cycle.

“What if it’s not and you could have made it worse?”

“What if my blood ran foul if I didn’t use it?”

“What if your blood ran foul because you did?” Rahima offered the gloom and doom alternative. “Besides,” she continued, frowning, “there is no way to verify that. Unless you hurt yourself again.”

“I’m not going to hurt myself on purpose!” Cimmy protested.

“Well, then we’ll have to wait for the next time you do it on accident and try to see if the leaf makes your blood turn foul,” Rahima continued in the most natural tone.

“Rahima!” Cimmy couldn’t believe her ears. “Remind me not to get on your bad side!”

“I’m just saying,” the latter replied, trying to appease her. “How else are you going to find out?”

“Maybe we can boil the leaves and drink the water, see what happens,” Cimmy continued, inspired by the blue liquid brewing in the cauldron.

“You’re going to poison yourself!” Rahima exploded.

“So you agree that it will do something to my body,” Cimmy continued.

“So would a knife, but you’re not going to swallow that either,” Rahima retorted.

The logic had come to a stopping point, so they continued to watch the pot in silence. A few minutes later, Cimmy couldn’t help herself.

“How does it poison me, exactly?”

“Here,” Rahima offered her a ladle of blue dye. “Drink this!”

“No!” Cimmy shook her head.

“Why not? How is it different? It’s a boiled plant!”

“But it didn’t heal my wound. It stained my shirt,” Cimmy replied.

“Maybe the other leaf can stain your shirt, too. You haven’t tried,” Rahima argued. Cimmy acknowledged her friend’s objection and put testing the leaf for dye pigments on her list of things to do.

“But it also healed my wound.”

“You don’t know that,” Rahima disagreed, stubbornly. “But say it did. How would you be able to tell apart the plants that heal your wound from the plants that stain your shirt?”

“How do you tell apart the plants you eat from the plants you use to make baskets?"

“I don’t know, you grow up with them, you get taught by your parents,” Rahima hesitated.

“How do you think they figured it out the first time? I mean, somebody must have figured it out at some point.”

“I guess starvation wises you up really fast,” Rahima frowned.

“So does blood sickness.” Cimmy’s eyes turned dark suddenly.

Life was harsh and cruel in their village, which had been visited by loss more times than the girl wanted to remember, and every time it did a deep sense of helplessness and inevitability set in, a sense that they were all slaves to an implacable fate.

Maybe it was a fool’s errand, but, according to the widely held opinion, she was a fool already. It wasn’t like she had a reputation to maintain.

Reputation, Cimmy thought, was incredibly damaging to a person’s creativity. It kept one locked into a state of being one didn’t belong to anymore, like a tree whose growth is stunted so it continues to fit in a dish. What good is your reputation when fate comes for you? That said, she blessed crazy with both hands, wrapped the sky blue gossamer veil around her head in an even more eccentric manner, if that were possible, and planned to go out into the fields and figure out the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt like her life depended on it. She had absolutely no idea how she was going to do that, of course.

“Maybe you can go blindfolded and hope to stumble upon them,” Rahima offered, half jokingly.

“You think that would work?” Cimmy asked seriously. Rahima shook her head in dismay and pulled out the blue cloth, which had finally achieved the desired hue, out of the cauldron.

“Do you think you can find other plants to get more colors?” she asked, pleased with the results, and went to spread the cloth on thistles to allow it to dry.

“At least we won’t run the risk of poisoning ourselves while doing that,” Cimmy thought.

---

Science

"Use leaves to heal wounds?” Bertha thundered, seriously irritated. “Is that what you’ve been doing instead of tending to your chores?”

Cimmy looked down, trying unsuccessfully to feign contrition.

“I’ve had it with you and your nonsense! You can go out into the meadow and graze for all I care. Useless cow!”

“What’s with the racket?” Josepha showed up, worried that she missed the scuffle.

“This nut thinks that you can heal people with foliage!”

“Why are you even paying attention to her? It’s Cimmaron we’re talking about. What did you expect?” Josepha continued, poised.

“She spent an entire month drawing leaves and writing about them. Are these the actions of a sane person?”

“Leave her be,” Josepha made an annoyed hand gesture. “If we could fix her, she’d be alright by now. Some people are beyond help.”

“So, what do you want to do, let her study dirt next?” Bertha commented, exasperated.

“That’s interesting,” Cimmy flew on a tangent, while she occupied the spot dedicated to public shaming in the middle of the village square. “I never thought about this. Maybe some type of dirt is better than others, and if so, it could help us improve the crops. I wonder what it would take to find that out.”

“Cimmaron!” Bertha screamed so loudly that Cimmy’s ear rang in a high-pitched whine for a while. The girl’s heart jumped in a panic. “Take that stupid thing off your head!” Bertha grabbed onto her headscarf, but the resilient fabric refused to rip. “From this day forward, you are forbidden, you hear me? Forbidden to entertain any more of this lunacy! Defy me and see what happens!” she got in Cimmy’s face, menacingly.

Cimmy returned her gaze with a long, probing stare, and the strange look of sadness and pity in the girl’s eyes further infuriated Bertha.

“Insolent snot!”

“Leave her be, Bertha. Who’s to say that she isn’t right?” Josepha tried to reestablish the peace.

“You too? You’re taking her side? What rational person insists you can heal sickness with plants? What’s next? Cutting people open to fix their insides?”

“What if it worked? As things stand right now, we’re all at death’s mercy,” Josepha replied softly.

“It doesn’t work! She knows that it doesn’t work! Tell us how it works and what plants?” she turned to Cimmy, who wasn’t there yet, knowledge-wise.

The girl shrugged.

“There’s your bearer of wisdom! You’re all wasting your time on a lunatic!” Bertha concluded her argument.

After everybody left to tend to their interests, Cimmy looked at all of her drawings and all of her writings, realized that she was no closer to an answer now than she was in the beginning, and started contemplating the fact that she may, in fact, be wasting her precious time on this doomed endeavor.

There was no logical starting point for any of the information, no way to structure it, no organizing connections, and no way to verify her assumptions, unless she considered hurting herself on purpose.

The wealth of data stared her back, a pile of random fragments indifferent to her plight.

“There is no way I can do this,” Cimmy thought. “Not without help. Not by myself.”

She put the stack of drawings away, determined never to look at them again, and found ways to keep herself occupied for the next month. And then, according to the law of averages, somebody else in the village got sick, and she, along with everybody else and just as helpless, had to watch from the sidelines and pray for life to prevail in the brutal battle with its reaper. When the struggle ended, she got angry, at life, at herself and at her own ignorance. But anger doesn’t make learning go faster, it doesn’t make one understand what one can’t understand yet, and it doesn’t help one perform miracles one hasn’t earned. There is no point in being angry at the amount of time it takes to master skills and knowledge. It diverts focus from actually acquiring them. If you find yourself looking long and hard for information about something you really care about and you can’t seem to find any references about it anywhere, that means you are the reference; you better figure it out as much as you can all by yourself, so you can be of use to the next person who is going to inquire about it.

She pulled out the plant drawings and started from the beginning, and she stopped caring how long it would take to figure out the connections between things, the logic of the whole endeavor, where the knowledge would lead her, or whether it will be something she would actually be able to use. It turns out the only way to tell the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt is to tell the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt. Everything else is extraneous detail.