"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Visionary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

"She didn't say not to come back."
"But I have lost the visions!"
"But you have your wits! Where is the center of your life, Flicker?"
I thought, not very long, and answered, "There. In that vision. In the Ninth House."
He said, "Your life turns on that center. Only don't blind your intellect by hankering after vision! You
know that the vision is not your self. The hawk turns upon the hawk's desire. You will come round home
and find the door wide open."
I danced the Sun upon the Mountain, as Hawk Woman had said to do, and after that I began to feel
that I must go. There were some people living in Wakwaha who sought vision or ecstasy by continuous
fasting or drug taking, and lived in hallucination; such people came not to know vision from imagination
and lived without honesty, making up the world all the time. I was afraid that if I stayed there I might
begin imitating them, as Deertongue had warned me. After all, I had gone wrong that way once before.
So I said goodbye to people, and on a cold, bright morning I went down the Mountain. A young redtail

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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary

hawk circled, crying over the canyons, "kiyir! kiyir!" so mournfully that I cried myself.
I went back to my mothers' household in Telina-na. My uncle had married and moved out, so I had his
small room to myself; that was a good thing, since my cousin had married and had a child, and the
household was as crowded and restless as ever. I went back to work with my father, learning both theory
and practice with him, and after two years I became a member of the Millers Art. He and I continued to
work together often. My life was nearly as quiet as it had been in Wakwaha. Sometimes I would spend
days in the heyimas drumming; there were no visions, but the silence inside the drumming was what I
wanted.
So the seasons went along, and I was thinking about what Hawk Woman had said. I was rewiring an
old house, Seven Steps House in the northeast arm of Telina, and while I was working there on a hot day,
a man of one of the households brought me some lemonade, and we fell to talking, and so again the next
day. He was a Blue Clay man from Chukulmas who had married a Serpentine woman of Telina. They
had been given two children, the younger born sevai. She had left the children with him and left her
mothers' house, going across town to marry a Red Adobe man. I knew her, she was one of the people I
had gambled with as a child, but I had never talked to this man, Stillwater, who lived in his children's
grandmother's house. He worked mostly as a chemist and tanner and housekeeper. We talked and got on
well and met to talk again. I came inland with him, and we decided to marry.
My father was against it, because Stillwater had two children in his household already and so I would
bear none; but that was what I wanted. My grandmother and mother were not heartily for anything I did,
because I had always disappointed them, and they did not want three more people in our house, which
was crowded enough. But that, too, was what I wanted. Everything I wanted in those years came to be.
Stillwater and the little boys and I made a household on the ground floor of Seven Steps House, where
their grandmother lived on the first floor. She was a lazy, sweet-tempered woman, very fond of Stillwater
and the children, and we got on very well. We lived in that house fourteen years. All that time I had what
I wanted and was contented, like a ewe with two lambs in a safe pasture, with my head down eating the
grass. All that time was like a long day in summer, in the fenced fields, or in a quiet house when the
doors are closed to keep the rooms cool. That was my life's day. Before it and after it were the twilights
and the dark, when things and the shadows of things become one.
Our elder son - and this was a satisfaction to my grandmother at last - went to learn with the Doctors
Lodge on White Sulfur Creek as soon as he entered his sprouting years, and by the time he was twenty he
was living at the Lodge much of the time. The younger died when he had lived sixteen years. Living with
his pain and always increasing weakness and seeing him lose the use of his hands and the sight in his
eyes had driven his brother to seek to be a healer, but living with his fearless soul had been my chief joy.