peace on earth

(Photo: Olaf Dziallas)

As the crickets' soft autumn hum

Is to us

So are we to the trees

As are they

To the rocks and the hills


~ Gary Snyder

The birds have dissolved into the sky
And the last remaining clouds have faded away
We sit together the mountain and me
Until only the mountain remains

~ Li Po, Zazen on Ching-t'inig Mountain

What have you done with your own gift of life?





(Amos Oz, Black Box)

California was one sweet bee garden throughout its entire length, north to south, and all the way across the snowy Sierra to the ocean. Wherever a bee might fly within the bounds of this virgin wilderness—through the Redwood forests, along the banks of the rivers, along the bluffs and headlands fronting the sea, over valley and plain, park and grove, and deep, leafy glen, or far up the piney slopes of the mountains—bee flowers bloomed in lavish abundance… broad, flowing folds hundreds of miles in length—zones of polleny forests, zones of flowery chaparral, stream tangles of rubus and wild rose, sheets of golden compositae, beds of violets, beds of mint, beds of bryanthus and clover… During the months of March, April, and May, the great central plain was one smooth, continuous bed of honey bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than four hundred miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky—one sheet of purple and gold.

~ John Muir's description of what California's great Central Valley used to be

(Photo: Larry Herzberg)

…no Scotch boy that I know of ever failed to listen with enthusiasm to the songs of skylarks. Oftentimes on a broad meadow near Dunbar we stood for hours enjoying their marvelous singing and soaring. From the grass where the nest was hidden the male would suddenly rise, as straight as if shot up, to a height of perhaps thirty or forty feet, and, sustaining himself with rapid wing-beats, pour down the most delicious melody, sweet and clear and strong, overflowing all bounds, then suddenly he would soar higher again and again, every higher and higher, soaring and singing until lost to sight even on perfectly clear days…

~ John Muir

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

~ Epictetus

The Peace of Wild Things

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

"Days need birds and so they come..."

~ James Schuyler

(Photo: Rosalie Winard, American avocets, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Box Elder County, Utah, 2003)

(Photo: Louise Docker)