Outside Reading, Laura Boleyn

Annie Dillard is an amazing writer. After reading, “Living Like Weasels” from Teaching a Stone to Talk, all I want to do is read more. She gives great detail and adds humor as well.
In “Living Like Weasels,” we see the methods discussed in chapter 9 of Making Nature Sacred, such as “meditating on the creatures.” Meditation on the creatures, as discussed by Gatta, goes together with meditation on self and meditation on Scripture. In this shot essay, Dillard describes a visit to Hollin’s Pond where she encounters a weasel. She first describes the behaviors of the weasel, hunting and sucking the warm blood of mice and other small prey, and then describes her encounter. She was sitting on a log when a weasel came up out of the water and locked eyes with her. She describes it as, “a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons.” This is the connection with wilderness as sacred place ad it environment that we have been learning throughout the course. In the encounter, Dillard says that it was like she and the weasel switched brains: he could see what she was thinking and she could see what he was thinking. But at the same time, Dillard wonders how a weasel really thinks and lives. All she knows is what she sees in what she calls his journal: “His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf and blown.” Such vivid descriptions, leaving out the beauty also parallel the change in style of nature writing discussed in Making Nature Sacred. She also briefly mentions the effects of careless behavior, trash, specifically beer cans, mixed in the bush, maybe the home of a muskrat.
The encounter for Dillard also served as spiritual growth and advice. She wants to learn how live like a weasel- “mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive.” Not living by choice but instead by necessity. She advises the reader to “grasp your own necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.” To me, this seems like it would be good advice for a spiritual journey to find yourself, however it is necessary for you. She finishes with, “Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.” This final piece of advice, full of detail and just wonderfully written, demonstrates the need to find yourself spiritually. The parallel to the life of a weasel shows how the use of nature is important for meditation on self and on creatures. The final excerpt also seems like a good journey, not necessarily a trip or pilgrimage, although it very well could be, but also a journey through life and it offers a good way to live.