Sojourner

On the plane home to Texas today I got so near finishing Annie Dillard's "Teaching a Stone to Talk" and since then the word sojourner has been continually tripping through my head.

"I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word "sojourner" occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people's sense of vagrancy, a praying people's knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people's intuition of sharp loss: "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding."

and then the next page, the part where Annie brings together all the illusions throughout the chapter, so I will loan it to you if you want to learn more about mangroves.

" The planet is less like an enclosed spaceship - spaceship earth - than it is like an exposed mangrove island beautiful and loose. We the people started small and have since accumulated a great and solacing muck of soil, of human culture. We are rooted in it we are bearing it with us across nowhere. The word "nowhere" is our cue: the consort of musicians strikes up, and we in the chorus stir and move and start twirling our hats. A mangrove island turns drift to dance. It creates its own soil as it goes, rocking over the salt sea at random, rocking day and night round the sun, rocking round the sun and out toward east of Hercules."