[The] sound of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

  

From above, to a hawk, the bend must appear only natural and I for the moment inseparably a part, like salmon or a flower. I cannot say well enough how this single perception has dismantled my loneliness.
- Barry Lopez, River Notes: The Dance of Herons

Wholeness is being in tune with the wind, sand and stars. . . When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animals nor the birthright of a true humanity.
              -Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

  

Journal Note:

Cosmic outlaws living outside the rhythms of the natural world, the universe.
At times I’ve lived inside those rhythms
And encountered a deep peace, a peace without words.