“To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept.
Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that, those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves. Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.”
Source: Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
“At least Ozymandias had a statue erected in his name. If I were to have died at that moment, the only thing I had managed to erect in my honor was a shrine to China’s manufacturing capabilities.”
Source: Nature's Housekeeper
“How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, in the long run, will tell what kind of people we really are.
-Laurance S. Rockefeller”
Source: The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
“Stepping out onto any lookout, you are invited to connect with an amazing example of some of the most unusual terrain on this planet, making you feel as though you are stepping foot on the edge of another world.”
Source: A Year in the National Parks: The Greatest American Road Trip
“If owning frivolous articles of excess were indeed the trappings of malevolence, my home was ready to play host to the Axis powers.”
Source: Nature's Housekeeper
“I'd somehow managed to get an executive stuck in a tree. Instead of a saucer of milk and 'Here kitty, kitty, kitty,' someone might want to bring a hedge fund and a recording of George Bush promising 'No new taxes.”
Source: Nature's Housekeeper
“As soon as the first piece of foliage came within blade’s reach, my student started frantically swinging the machete like he was defending his virtue from a trove of drunken, handsy woodland elves. 'I feel like I’m in the movie Predator,' he said as he decapitated a flower.”
Source: Nature's Housekeeper
“Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke’s description of “raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet.” Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified.”
Source: Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
“We never fell ill, not once during one year in the U.S. national parks--perhaps proof of the therapeutic properties of our natural world.”
Source: A Year in the National Parks: The Greatest American Road Trip
“Most don't enter through a gated entrance as is done at so many other national parks, but through invisible passageways by sea.”
Source: A Year in the National Parks: The Greatest American Road Trip