Three syncs from When Women Were Birds

I've just finished reading When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams -- a good read overall, though perhaps a bit too Creative Writing for some tastes.

I started reading it at about the same time that I started Words of Them Liberated, and in "Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs" I noted the coincidence that both books begin with a short epigraph invoking birds and emptiness. A further sync between the two books is that Words has this image at the beginning, written in a strange vertical script that vanishingly few people can read (Rúmilian, as rendered by Polish artist Karolina Stopa):

Birds contains a section about Nüshu, a secret writing system once used by women in a single county of China. The book includes an image of this strange vertical script that vanishingly few people can read:

Besides the general conceptual similarity, both scripts incorporate groups of dots, and both were written by women.

In "Red and blue eyes, Egyptian edition" (January 22), I noted a sync having to do with "fire kasina" -- the practice of staring into a candle flame for a period of time and then closing your eyes and focusing on the afterimage of the flame. This is supposed to be able to produce intense visions comparable to a psychedelic experience.

Terry Tempest Williams describes doing something very similar in a church:

I lit a tall, thin taper and placed it in a cast-iron clip molded in the shape of a scallop. The Virgin glowed. The gold pattern on her gown was meant to illuminate light, not to impress. The church became darker as the flame intensified. I stared at the flame. I closed my eyes, but the flame remained, still and numinous, and I recalled a poet's line after just such a gesture: "Now, you have seen eternity."

Shortly after I had started reading When Women Were Birds, I published "A prayer," which begins with these lines:

The players bow; the watchers rise.

The program printed on the page

Has reached its end, and now no eyes

But God's alone are on the stage.

The central image of Birds is the author's mother's journals, which she left to her, and which all turned out to be entirely blank. Throughout the book, a meditation on X will be punctuated with the sentence "My Mother's Journals are X." There are nearly a hundred such sentences in all, most of them scattered throughout the book and interspersed with narrative vignettes, but in Chapter LI -- which I read two days after publishing the above poem -- we are treated to a long list of them, one after another, from which I quote this extract:

My Mother's Journals are a stage.

My Mother's Journals are scenes painted white.

My Mother's Journals are programs never printed.