Sunday, December 6, 2009

The Indifferent Stars Above

I just finished reading The Indifferent Stars Above (The Harrowing Saga of A Donner Party Bride)

This book was along the direction of Follow The River..Terrible adversity that our fore fathers encountered as this nation was born. Putting a cresh together with the image of the Oxen may seem strange but in the book I am referring to,oxen as indispensable work animals ,were referred to repeatedly.
One passage was as follows when the wagons had to be hauled up a incline"they decided to assault a steep hog back ridge..One by one they yoked each wagon to long strings of oxen-as many as 24 at a time-and then drove them laboriously up the slope .Each time they reached the top,some one had to lead them back down and do the whole thing over again"

And the Cresh ?
The connection hardly, through these beast of burden but a final passage about the main character Sarah Graves ,,

"What to make of her story? I'm not sure the language even has words that are adequate to the task. But I think what Sarah's story tells us is that there were in fact heroes in the Donner Party,and that heroes are sometimes the most ordinary-seeming people .It reminds us that as ordinary we might be ,we can,if we choose take the harder road ,walk forth bravely under the indifferent stars.We can hazard the ravages of chance..We can choose to endure what seems unendurable and thereby open up the possibility of prevailing.We can awaken to the world as it is and ,seeing it with eyes wide open,we can nevertheless embrace hope rather then despair.When all is said and done,I think the story tells us that hope is the hero's 'domain not the fool's Because we dare to hope -even when doing it might undo us-we leave the worlds we create behind us,swirling in our wakes, eternal and effervescent with the beauty of our aspirations"
Daniel James Brown
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2 comments:

karl marx said...

nice pictures but you forgot to include Joseph along with Mary & Jesus.

karl marx said...

nice pictures but you forgot to include Joseph along side Mary & Jesus.