Occasionally, a neighbor crosses our fields, homeward bound after a strenuous afternoon scrambling around ponds and up and down rocky hills on the land behind ours. A couple of days ago he discovered me sitting in the midst of the meadow, savoring the passing fleecy clouds, listening to the wind whispering in the dried grass, picking up the song of the last of the crickets, watching a large, green grasshopper hawking over the meadow, feeling the still-warm wind on …
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. I’ve just been dipping into Thoreau’s Sounds, and I’ve been stung. As Jon Kabat-Zinn points out in his fine meditation book, Wherever you Go There You Are, this passage is really about cultivating stillness. Was it possible that I could simply stop? Years ago, I had …
a world of uncountable beings dedicating their lives to growing something meaningful and beauty-filled, Something Beautiful for the World Tarchin Hearn How can you continue to celebrate nature even as you witness its destruction? How hypocritical. Where you need to be is on the front-line of protest. This painful spring, the first with no dawn chorus, the only answer that comes to me is one clearer to my heart than my intellect. In the face of forces greater than anything …