This is the sixth in a weekly series of micro-essays using weird, wild, and wonderful words from Dr. Waffle’s venerable list.
telluric, adj.
Of or relating to the earth (as a planet); terrestrial, earthly. Also: of or relating to the ground or soil.
< classical Latin tellūr-, tellūs earth (see Tellus n.) + ‑ic suffix, originally after French tellurique
Bread Loaf
I just returned from a week-long conference for environmental writers in Vermont, and my heart is full. That is a terrible cliché, but it’s appropriate to fall back on cliché when one’s heart is full. There was learning and teaching, there was reading and listening, there were workshops and classes and hikes and all of the things in the brochure. There was karaoke and dancing and fiddle music, there were new wartime buddies and tender crushes and sweet gossip and fireflies and fried potatoes at every meal. A fragile week-long utopia appeared on top of a mountain like a glistening soap bubble fed by telluric currents. The currents have shifted and blown us all gently home again, where we will remember everything for a time, and then gradually a little less, and then finally nothing at all. But the bubble will remain, the feeling of it, the memory of the memory. It’s the bubble that has lodged in the heart, making it full.
Bread Loaf is magical