To me, a collector of nature quotes of power and beauty, the following passage by Meridel Le Sueur is one of the most beautiful I’ve come across.

The owl rides the meadow at his hunting hour. The fox clears out the pheasants and the partridges in the cornfield. Jupiter rests above Antares, and the fall moon hooks itself into the prairie sod. A dark wind flows down from Mandan as the Indians slowly move out of the summer campground to go back to the reservation. Aries, buck of the sky, leaps to the outer rim and mates with earth. Root and seed turn into flesh. We turn back to each other in the dark together, in the short days, in the dangerous cold, on the rim of a perpetual wilderness.
- Meridel LeSueur, from an essay entitled “The Ancient People and the Newly Come”, in the book Growing Up In Minnesota.

Meridel was a great force of energy unlike anyone I’ve ever met. When she walked into a room, the whole dynamic changed. People were drawn to her warmth, her very presence. She uplifted us all. We loved her, we loved ourselves. She always engaged with us, taught us, energized us, challenged us to create a new world based on social justice, respect for one another, and love for our home, the earth.
- from Meridel Lesueur, A Remembrance by Neala Schleuning.

. . . just last week I met Meridel Le Sueur in Taos, New Mexico. She is a writer in her eighties who has written several novels, short stories, poetry books. She said she lives nowhere now. She visits people, stays in their homes, and writes wherever she is. She just came from California, where she visited her daughter, and was now going to stay with friends in Taos and write there. She asked if there was a place she could purchase an old manual typewriter for about thirty dollars. After she finishes with it, she’ll give it away, as she does in each place she visits, so she doesn’t have to lug it with her to her next destination. So much for writing studios!

-       Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones

Have you ever known someone who devoted their life to what they saw as truth, gentleness and peace? And lived a life full of setbacks, ups and downs, and yet persisted with their vision of what humans were capable of? And ultimately triumphed in the sense that Walt Whitman meant it.
Meridel Le Sueur was such a person.

Horace Traubel, biographer of Walt Whitman, once asked Whitman, "Suppose the whole damned thing went up in smoke, Walt, would you consider your life a failure?"

            Whitman's response: "Not a bit of it. . .No life is a failure. I have done the work: I have thrown my life into the work:. . . my single simple life: utting it up for what it was worth: into the book -- pouring it into the book: honestly, without stint, giving the book all, all, all: why should I call it a failure? Why? Why? I don't think a man can be so easily wrecked a that."'