WEBVTT

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I'm going to read you two kind
of this book, The Two Trees.

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Very helpful my publisher.

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They put two trees on the cover.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I don't really see the
world in terms of stories.

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Writing narrative,
poems are something

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I had to teach myself extremely
actively and self-consciously

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how to do.

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But it's a very
useful thing to know.

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Just the use of that narrative
structure because it provides

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momentum and then you can use
it for all kinds of other things

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even if you don't have --

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What was it O'Connor said?

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You have to have at
least two things that

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happened right to make a story.

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Only one thing happens
is not a story.

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Something like that or
braiding of events or actions.

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That happen over the course
of time and have consequences.

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So even if you don't
see the world that way,

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it's a useful
structure that you can

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use for other sorts
of meditation,

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and imagination,
and fantasy even.

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So this is one of those bars,
that structure although not

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much happens.

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This is a poem called
"Woman Who Leaps."

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"Up from the Valley, 10
children working the fields

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and three in the
ground plus four

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who'd slept like fish from a
faulty she wept to the priest.

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'Father I saw the
virgin on a hill.

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She was a lion, lying on
her side grooming her blond

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shoulders with her tongue.'

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Six months weeping as she hold
the corn gathered late fruit

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and milk the goats, planted
grain and watch the hill side

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blossom.

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Before she went to the
bishop, kissed his ring.

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Father, I saw our lady in
a tree swaddled in black,

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she was a raven on one
leg on one bent claws.

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She hunched in the tree,
but she was the tree charred

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trunk and a thicket of green.

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After seven years of weeping
not as others stunned,

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old women weep.

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She baked flatbread, wash the
cooking stones cut a staff

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from a sapling by the road.

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The Holy Father sat
in a gilded chair,

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father I saw Christ's mother
in a stream, she was a rock.

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The water parted on either
side of her from one stream

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she made two.

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Two tresses loosened
across her collarbone

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until the pouring
water melted her breast

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and made a single stream again.

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Then from the marketplace
from the busiest stall,

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she Stole five ripened figs
and carried her weeping back

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to the countryside.

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With a cloth sack,
with a beggar's cup,

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village to village, and
into the smokey huts.

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Her soul a welled an
eye, an open door."

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