A Pause for Beauty:
An artist’s journal.
What Is Life?
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time; it is the little shadow, which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
— Last words of Crowfoot, Blackfoot hunter
Then a great peace came over me. . . and I seemed to hear the pines and the wind and the rocky shores say to me, “You . . . lover of the wild, are part of us. . .”
- Sigurd F. Olson
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 The Ancient People and the Newly Come
The excerpts above also appear in Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence