There’s a reason God didn’t create “The Farm of Eden.” A person can walk in a garden naked with a lover, sharing fruit, caught up in the enchantment of nature. Gardens are about beauty and meditation. But farms? According to Genesis, farms are cursed ground. Farms are work. Farms are production, harvest, sales, shipping, payables, receivables, payroll and taxes.

Andy Griffin, Ladybug Letter #342 The Law of the Fern Bar

To find stories you must give yourself to the moment. Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations and silences. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease.

A story has a feel, a scent, a tingle. It may lie around the next corner, beyond a silence or in a glance.

Roger Cohen: In praise of being cut off – International Herald Tribune

Hasten slowly and ye shall soon arrive.
– Milarepa

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

—Thomas Merton (1915-1968) Catholic author and monk (via Appalachian Treks: Looking deep)

The best six doctors anywhere and no one can deny it, are sunshine, water, rest, air, Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly attend you if only you are willing
Your mind they’ll ease
Your will they’ll mend
And charge you not a shilling.

~Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows, 1990

“If you’ll scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist. And the fire never goes out completely. And that part of me that made my mother say, ‘You have a lovely nature,’ is very true.”

George Carlin, 1937-2008