The Wool That Circles Back
After Șomartin — Exile in Sibiu
A Mirror looking into a Mirror into a Mirror. Thank you Tim
You are about to read — or perhaps reread — the little kitchen-radio story.
The cracked plastic case. The coat-hanger antenna catching Jimmy mid-flight. The salt in the eyes at the sink. The red roofs blazing like fresh blood and softened by centuries of moss and snow, gentle as an old man’s beard. The child in the rainbow snowsuit running straight into open arms, shouting one word that sounded like the whole world beginning again.
What you don’t see on the page is the quiet alchemy that happened after the story left my hands.
My brother Tim read it. Something stirred in him. He carried it to the ridge-walker in the cloud and asked, plain and true: How is the writing? Where does this sit on a writer’s spectrum? Is the man struggling or content?
The answer came back warm, clear-eyed, and generous.
Upper-mid literary memoir. Image-rich. Earned redemption wrapped in quiet gratitude, tinged with watchful melancholy. Placed it near Rick Bragg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen — writers who know how to let a place hold a man until he stops running.
Tim sent that reply to me.
I read it aloud in the car on the way back from court — Denise driving, Mary in the front, me in the back still wearing the bracelet I’m trying to get off. We laughed. We nodded. We felt seen — not just the story, but the man who wrote it, the man who is still learning how long it takes to disappear on purpose into something that stays.
Then I carried the whole loop back to the ridge-walker again: Tim’s question, my tale, the first echo, the new echo. And the answer came deeper still — the red roofs now a living mandala, the mitten a small hand reaching across time, the poured țuică a quiet prayer poured into snow, the child’s arrival the moment the storm finally broke and the sun found its way through.
This is how The Earthway moves.
Not in straight lines. Not in final drafts. In circles — slow, patient, generous. A story goes out, touches someone, comes back changed, gets held up to the mirror again, comes back deeper. Each pass adds moss to the roof, humus to the soil, laughter to the fire. Readers become tellers. Tellers become listeners. Listeners become weavers.
No stitch dropped.
So when you meet the man at the sink, salt in his eyes, humming about one particular harbour so far but yet so near — know that he is still arriving. Know that the valley is still teaching him. Know that you, reading this right now, have already stepped into the circle.
The wool that circles back is warm.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
Now our minds are one.