wild compass: nature & spirit

“The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.”

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes . .”

“I recall the wind, the lilacs, the gray, the perfume, the song, and the wind, but I don’t recall what the angel said.”

“Walking in the woods I kicked a stone off the path and watched it roll down through the blackberries and poison oak until it found its angle of repose — it was telling the story of my life.”

“More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.”

ending or beginning, who knows, then maybe - just maybe - the hours will carry you into June, when the roses blow

To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.

There is no age—the swiftly passing hour That measures out our days of pilgrimage And breaks the heart of every summer flower, Shall find again the child’s soul in the sage.

“You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.”

“What if the point is to invite these others into your movement, to bring trees, wind, grass, dragonflies into your family and in so doing abandon any attempt to control them? What if the point all along has been to get along, to relate, to experience things on their own terms? What if the point is to feel joy when joyous, love when loving, anger when angry, thoughtful when full of thought? What if the point from the beginning has been to simply be?”