Sharon F. McDermott: How to Love a Transcendentalist
Walking across the quad, on my way to my first class, my senses swooned at the sight and scent of blossoms capping the apple trees with billowing clouds. Pink and white petals perfumed the air and spiraled down on breezy days. Bees hummed in the canopies; birds nested there.
John Burroughs: Waiting
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind nor tide nor sea;
I rave no more ‘gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.
Baron Wormser: Remembering the Alchemists & Other Essays
One sentence speaks for all his direct, well-wrought sentences: “We are inside the largest militarist society the world has ever known, and we are at war always.”
Paul Christensen: The Snow It Snoweth Every Day
I’m not complaining too loudly. The Ukrainians are out there on the hills waiting to get into Poland, and the snow is pelting their thin coats and caps and making the kids squirm up against their moms.
Wendy Mnookin: In the Small Rotary
where Route 100 meets School Street,
two cows graze.
Henry David Thoreau: On Eating Animals
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilised.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.
Tony Whedon: Field of Vision | Blues and Greens
Between this and that, my wife, my dear little cowslip,
was misdiagnosed with heart failure and everything I loved
lost its pigment. The old reds weren’t red anymore,
the rose bushes on the path by the river had lost their pink
George Yancy: Dear God, Are You There?
We are in a deep spiritual crisis that can’t be relieved by politics, or philosophy.
Rachel Carson: The Beauties and Mysteries of the Earth
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: What If You Slept
What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower … Continue reading
