'Sometimes, on a very clear night,' the BFG said, 'and if I is swiggling my ears in the right direction,' - and here he swivelled his great ears upwards so they were facing the ceiling - 'if I is swiggling them like this and the night is very clear, I is sometimes hearing faraway music coming from the stars in the sky.'
    A queer little shiver passed through Sophie's body. She sat very quiet, waiting for more.


Roald Dahl
-From The BFG 


Photo courtesy of Ben Arrowsmith

He told me it was worth the time.
He said trees are very honest and they don't care much for fancy people.
And he said he doesn't know of anything as important as sitting in that tree.

- Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnell

From The Other Way to Listen

First Christmas card:

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease in incurable.



- John Steinbeck

From Travels with Charley: In Search of America

What we find beautiful accords with our most profound sense of how things ought to be. Ordinarily, we live in tension between our perceptions and our desires. When we encounter beauty, that tension vanishes, and inward and outward images agree.

- Scott Russell Sanders

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world more habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as our culture defined it.

- David Orr

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.

The least we can do is try to be there.

- Annie Dillard

Some one had sneaked up on Feller. Crouched in the ditch, bent over the mouth of the culvert, his hands in its cold gurgle of water, Feller felt eyes.
He whirled and saw shoes. On the roadbed above him were shoes with turned-up toes and zigzag tread. (That track, he had seen that running track this summer on the road past his cabin.) From the shoes rose short, muscular legs thick-furred with brown hair. The legs ended in red shorts. Above the shorts was a blue T-shirt with a broad tongue of sweat up its center. The bound ends of the two brown braids of hair jerked Feller's eyes up to a woman's face.
She was the ugliest woman Feller had ever seen. Her face was wide and flat, punctured in its middle by small, pinched-together blue eyes - a shovel held up to the sky with two .22 slugs shot through its center. Though he had never seen this woman, it was clear to Feller that she was the reason he had never married.
"What is it you're doing?" the woman asked.
Feller's eyes flickered to his basket of traps on the bank. Her eyes followed his.
"Setting a trap," Feller said. From disuse his voice croaked like a magpie. Living alone in the woods, Feller did not have to talk to many people. He liked it that way.
- Will Weaver
From The Trapper

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening,
In the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful sight,
We're happy tonight.
Walking in a winter wonderland.

A Color of the Sky

BY TONY HOAGLAND

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,

driving over the hills from work.

There are the dark parts on the road

                     when you pass through clumps of wood   

and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,   

but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize

for being so boring at dinner last night,

but can I really promise not to be that way again?   

And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing   

in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;

the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves

are full of infant chlorophyll,   

the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,   

and on the highway overpass,

the only metaphysical vandal in America has written   

MEMORY LOVES TIME

in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.

She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.   

Years ago she penetrated me

but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,   

I never got her out,

but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.   

What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.   

What I thought was an injustice

turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store   

and the police station,

a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,   

like a sudsy mug of beer;

like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.   

It’s been doing that all week:

making beauty,

and throwing it away,

and making more.

A Brief Photo Study of Wildlife 

in Madison, WI. 

Red Tail Hawk

Octopus

Sea Dog

and the tracks of...

PARTY ANIMALS!

FIN

It makes one all right, though you hadn’t thought of it,

A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon,   

Whistling and crackling, the explosions of sunlight booming   

As the huge mass of gas rages into the emptiness around it.

It isn’t a sound you are often aware of, though the light speeds   

To us in seconds, each dawn leaping easily across a chasm   

Of space that swallows the sound of that sphere, but   

If you listen closely some morning, when the sun swells   

Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep,   

You might hear it, a faint noise so far inside your mind

That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness,   

Energy burning towards entropy, towards a peaceful solution,   

Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere,   

And you, too, must make a sound that is somewhat like it,   

Though that, of course, you have no way of hearing at all.


The Sound of the Sun
by George Bradley

After fantastic visits with close friends and family, it is good to be back north. I do not hold the sentiments expressed below - only a love for exceptional writing. 

 The sheriff was standing close now, as if to get Olaf's attention.
  "You've been farming here in Hubbard County how long, fifty years?
  Olaf blinked. "Fifty-three years."
  "And I've been the sheriff over half that time. I know you, I know the boys. None of you has ever broken a law that I can think of, not even the boys. The town folk respect that..."
  Olaf's vision cleared and something in him hardened at the mention of town folk. He had never spent much time in town, did not like it there very much. And he believed that, though farmers and townspeople did a lot of business together, it was a business of necessity; that in the end they had very little in common. He also had never forgotten how the town folk treated Inge when she first came to Hubbard County. 
  "What I mean is," the sheriff continued, "you don't want to start breaking the law now when you're seventy-five years old."
  "Seventy-eight," Olaf said. 
  "Seventy-eight," the sheriff repeated.
  They were all silent. The sheriff mopped his forehead again. The silence went on for a long time. 


- Will Weaver 
From A Gravestone Made of Wheat