Sleepy Fox Hollow einigung

was that not simply the way of things, after all? no clear-cut answers, no lists, no guidebooks. only the endless toil, of turning the soil of your own soul over and over until you were able to see the dark seeds of your own past. and then the unrecognized work of plucking edible from poisonweed.
"yes," mahler answered, and then there it was: arrow lake, with its tiering of waterfalls and the way it rose from the sharp-edged earth like a pristine jewel.
there the copses of pine and oak and birch; there the smooth sandstone shores he had walked with stigmata, with ruenna, with ketzia, with thorn, with too many to name and too many to remember now; recollections rose and gathered, bumping up and colliding with one another in the back of his mind.
but still mahler stoic stayed; he would not shift nor change, not when he could tell himself that river needed the stability of his being to see her through this now.
the shape of the world around the lake had changed, no doubt from the long-ago rockslide.
but its essence remained: feral, charged, commanding.