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“She leaned over and opened her little satchel and unstrung the set of Buddhist flags she had bought through a mail-order catalogue. She put on his t-shirt and looked at the struts that bolstered the overhang by the door. ‘Can you help me, Coop? I need to get up there. We can tack this to the rain lip over the door.’ She already had his hammer in her hand, and a nail. He crouched so she could sit on his shoulders. ‘Time for the heart and the mind,’ she sang. ‘You need to be wind-blessed!’ He could feel her wetness at the back of his neck, as she reached up and attached one end of the strip of flags so the snake of it fluttered loose, free of the earth.
There are five flags, she explained. The yellow one is earth, the green one is water, the red is fire - the one we must escape - and white is cloud, and blue is sky, limitless space or mind. Coop, I don’t know what to do. She was on his shoulders, in mid-air, looking into space.”
- Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, p. 28-29
