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Family and Relationships
The Last Time I Fell In Love
Equilateral triangles; excruciating insights; ecstasies and traumas
December 1983People, Land, And Community
During the last eighteen years, for example, I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken eighteen years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken eighteen years.
December 1983Summer
There’s the pain denied so many times, in so many ways, that I know its disguises in others, can tell an honest man from a block away: he sways on his vulnerability, no flower but fully human, bends to his breeze, weeps in his rain.
November 1983Sunbeams
October 1983A human being is a part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Solitude
Compost piles, 1500 acres of uninhabited mountaintop land, the jazz of the tree frogs
October 1983
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