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The Valley Between

I could feel the losses of my past lurking nearby. Not just animals but other losses, too. They exhaled from the piles like human whispers.

Haunted

Mouse angels I have called them, / terrifying and warm and mythical, / seeming almost terrified themselves, / skittering after the echoes of / their own voices homing in / on the smaller creatures of the night

Culled

It was too quiet: no bellowing of elk, no call of owls. As I opened the front door, I could smell the beef stew I’d left simmering on the stove, but there was no music, and our dog Neva did not greet me.

Sunbeams

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

Rachel Carson

Riding Out At Evening

At dusk, everything blurs and softens. / From here out over the long valley, / the fields and hills pull up / the first slight sheets of evening, / as, over the next hour,  / heavier, darker ones will follow.

Something In The Water

Robert Bilott On Corporate Greed And Chemical Contamination

The cows were getting sick and wasting away. They were developing tumors. Their teeth were turning black. Calves were stillborn or born with cloudy or deformed eyes.

Sunbeams

A memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Sunbeams

Silence is something that comes naturally when you are watching, when you are watching without motive, without any kind of demand, just to watch, and see the beauty of a single star in the sky, or to watch a single tree in a field, or to watch your wife or husband, or whatever you watch. To watch with a great silence and space. Then in that watching, in that alertness, there is something that is beyond words, beyond all measure.

J. Krishnamurti

The Desert Within

Douglas Christie On The Power Of Silence And Contemplation

There was a value placed on listening as closely as possible to the mysterious silence that supports existence, which is both the actual silence of the desert landscape and the silence of the self in contemplation.