Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver Page B

genuine wilderness, we will have to become the kind of people who can imagine a faraway, magical place like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—and all the oil beneath it—and declare that it is not ours to own because it already owns itself. It’s going to demand the most selfless kind of love to do right by what we cherish, and to give it the protection to flourish outside our possessive embrace.
    Maybe that step begins with giving up ownership of the most beautiful shell on the beach, not simply to save the life of a homely, ordinary crab, but as an exercise in resisting the hunger to possess all things bright and beautiful. It can begin when a ten-year-old mind senses the sovereignty of living worlds apart from her own, so that a perfect shell may be—must be—thrown back into the sea. We humans have fallen far from the grace we once had, when we could look on every mountain with fear and reverence, but we have also crept slowly back from the depths, when we needed to have our names carved on every mountaintop and a passenger pigeon in every pot. We seem mostly to be moving in some kind of right direction, if only we aren’t too late. I hope my own mistakes will serve as a benchmark for my children, to show them how life accumulates its wisdom and moves on.

A Forest’s Last Stand
    X mul. X’pujil. Once you learn to pronounce the X as a “Shh…,” the place-names of the Mayas sound like so many whispered secrets. So does the Mayan language that is still spoken, with quiet ubiquity, in the Yucatán. Along rural roadsides, where fathers and sons walk in early light to the milpas, you can hear it. At the Merida market where women sit and lean their heads together behind stacks of tomatoes and chaya leaves, this language of secrets is passed along.

    Leading south from the colonial city of Merida to the ruins of ancient Uxmal is anold road that rises into dry hills of farms and woodlands. This was the road we chose. As Steven drove, I navigated, using a map that showed a Mesoamerican culture’s famous antiquities while somehow neglecting to mention that the culture itself was still completely alive. This was Mayan countryside. Nearly every little town had an X to its name, and every woman who walked along the roadside had on the Mayan dress, a lace-trimmed white cotton tunic brilliantly embroidered at the bodice and hem. All of the dresses were different, like eye-popping snowflakes, and they obviously weren’t put on for tourists—we were by this time well out of tourist terrain. The women wore them when they did their marketing, laundering, and garden work, and even, as I saw once, when they fed the family hogs; miraculously, the dresses always seemed to remain dazzlingly white. To my eye, this was magical realism.
    Our journey’s end lay much farther to the south, in the humid forests that touch the Guatemalan border, but I tend to travel toward destinations the same way I look up words in the dictionary, getting sidetracked by every possible item of interest along the way. So we made a detour to inspect one of the notable antiquities on our map: Uxmal. Older by centuries than the aggressively heroic pyramids at Chichén Itzá, Uxmal’s structures are just as tall but somehow less high-and-mighty. (They are also far less frequently visited by tourists, because they aren’t handily reached from Cancún.) The Pyramid of the Magician is round-shouldered and delicate—if the latter word can reasonably be used of a pyramid. Also the plaza at Uxmal is less grandly paved, more mossy underfoot than Chichén Itzá’s. The soft ground swallowed the sounds of our steps as we walked through the enormous, silent city. Everywhere we looked, the facades were etched with turtles, monkeys, and jaguars, and the staircases guarded by feather-headed serpents. Living iguanas the size of small alligators perched on the cornerstones, glaring at us in a good