I say that it touches a man that his blood is seawater and his tears are salt, that the seed of his loins is scarcely different from the same cells in a seaweed, and that of stuff like his bones are coral made.   I say that physical and biologic law lies down with him, and wakes when a child stirs in the womb, and that the sap in a tree, uprushing in the spring, and the smell of the loam, where the bacteria bestir themselves in darkness, and the path of the sun in the heaven, these are facts of first importance to his mental conclusions, and that a man who goes in no consciousness of them is a drifter and a dreamer, without a home or any contact with reality.
        - Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac For Moderns

Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of this life? That is what every heart is shouting, what every head is asking as it beats on in chaos. 
     - Nikos Kazantzakis

. . .

A man who goes in no consciousness
Of wild nature
A drifter
A dreamer
Without a home
Without contact with reality.

Every day
A walk in the woods
Unless it’s rainy and dark.
(As my old dad, an infantry man used to say,
"Any fool can be uncomfortable.")

Other than that,
Every day
Contact with reality
Contact.
     - Journal note.

. . .

Access other recent Art Journal posts, and books, poetry diary etc. from the prior twenty years of Heron Dance here.