The Waters of Separation
- It's the winter solstice, and Dillard has spent a full year at Tinker Creek.
- The first thing we learn in this chapter is that you can't, according to something she read once, kill a bee with an echo.
- She sees some inexplicably swarming around in the valley, and she yells, but they don't drop dead. So she tries yelling in Latin, but that doesn't work either.
- Dillard thinks about another form of ancient Israeli offering, called the "heave shoulder." In this one, rather than waving something at God, the rabbis threw it at him.
- This seems appropriate to Dillard—it's the job of the created to speak up for itself to the creator.
- She's seen a lot of death in the past year, and she thinks about how carelessly the universe kills us. Not just insects, but people who want to live.
- Tinker Creek has shown repeatedly that it's full of "waste and extravagance," what with the zillions of eggs laid in the hopes that a few might survive.
- She describes the Hebrew ritual of the creation of the "waters of separation." A priest finds a free-range heifer, one "which has never known the yoke," takes her away from her people's camp, and sacrifices her.
- He burns her body, along with some herbs for purification, and steeps the ashes in water, which is then sprinkled over the unclean to purify them. All that death for a sprinkle of water.
- Tinker Creek has purified Dillard. It has taught her about beauty and sorrow; it has taught her to see.
- She looks for one last sign to fortify her spirit, and she sees what appears to be a UFO.
- However, it's just a maple key, a seed in a leaf, reflecting the light. She will now see maple keys in everything—the wind, photographs of Earth from space, the eyes of other people. She will think of herself as a maple key, twirling.
- In order to really see the world, she thinks, in order to be a prophet, you have to do what Ezekiel commanded and "go up into the gaps." In other words, look for the truth of the world in the small, unseen places.
- Dillard realizes that you can only appreciate life when you cease to need it; when you pray "thank you" rather than "please" at the moment of death. She decides that God created the world in earnest—God just happens to be maniac, that's all.
- Emerson wrote about a dream in which he saw the world condensed into an apple, and an angel told him to eat the apple—in other words, to eat the world.
- Dillard thinks that eating the world, with all its beauty and bruises and imperfections, is the only way to truly experience it.