Chapter Ten
My return home this time was effortless, and I didn’t feel exhaustion chewing away at my brain. A new yearning came over me, stirring my chest, and I felt a lightness in my body as if water were raising me up to float upon it with ease.
It was a lightness in my limbs and joints I had known in the days of my childhood in the village, and I imagined myself in the valley jumping from rock to rock between the olive trees, searching for the small pools between the rocks, and picking the little wildflowers that had settled within the cracks.
Once a friend and I surprised my father in the monastery garden. We asked him for some apples, and he told us he would give us all the apples we wanted if we would first help him dig the small channels he was preparing for irrigation. While we
