In short, as I’ve told Ella, when your life gets all confused, off-kilter, and you know you’ve got nothing to be proud of, mistakes were made, well, step back from the small. For example, we think we see the “mountains” around us now, don’t we? Those peaks there seem so solid. The most real, most immovable objects we can observe or think about in a lifetime. Well, that notion, I see now, is a lie. Instead of still and solid, those mountains are purest action, crystalline fluid movement. True, they are a visible, solid surface, but they’re also proof of faults intersecting far below, reflecting only the smallest hint of the tumult, the titanic subsurface battles that dwarf any human action, idea, existence. It’s a matter of scale and vision. Bowman is big on this.

What I think is, to God, a mountain is a liquid wave that breaks over ten million years. Not a tenth of one of His seconds.

Can you see the wave now?

Not stone at all.

The trick to peace of mind, to Heaven on earth, to surviving suffering, is to see the mountain as a God would. Molten rock caught in an illusion of stillness by the limits of the human retina.

I’m trying to say to think big in times of crisis.

Just as your mind wants to cave in.

Move past what you think you can’t move past. Then think bigger. Expand. Look onward to the Grand Scale.

“Maybe we’re twins,” Little Danny had suggested once to Little Ginny, hooked side by side by heels and small round butts on a pasture fence, knives loose in bloody hands.

A branding.

Little Ella was one post down, miles away, elbows over the top rail, listening, watching three big men tackle a spotted calf in the thick dust and wicked sun.

“No,” Ginny’d said, “I’m nothing like you.”

That time, Ella climbed over, dropped down, and ran into the fray, a makeshift corral. She held the syringe high and the bucket low, pencil and paper in her back pocket since even then Ella did all the tallying, one slash plus four makes five on torn-off cardboard. Steer or heifer. The men circled in over the calf’s small balls. They waved Ginny in for cutting.

“Steer!”

An old man’s only job was to sharpen knives. He sat in the shade with the whetstone sipping Coke. Ginny stood over the little bull. The big men held him down, her heel on his hip.

Even in this collective memory, her knife signified something to all.