Just Because...

they're beautiful...

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.
-  Henry Beston, 1935, Herbs and the Earth                                          (Glacier national Park)

"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. " - Hermann Hesse                            (Lewis County, Kentucky) 

   

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see ...  No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives as water and good bread. -  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire                                                                                  (Camp Joy, Ohio)

So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      (Springrove Cemetary and Arboretum, Cincinnati, Ohio)       

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.  --- Henry Miller                   (Shabo Mekaw, Kinneykonick, Kentucky)

“It is a constant idea of mine that behind the cotton wool (of daily reality) is hidden a pattern, that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this: that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”  -Virginia Woolf                                  (Lewis County, Kentucky)

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.  --Wendell Berry               (Shabo Mekaw, Kinniconick, KY)

"So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.”-- Wendell Berry                                                                             (Shabo Mekaw)

 “When it’s over, I want to say: All my life I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms." --Mary Oliver                        (Taylor Mill, Kentucky)

   “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”-- Wendell Berry
 (Glacier National Park)

                                      (James River, Richmond, Virginia)


 “Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?"


 Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross
Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?”
-- Mary Oliver