The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies - from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space - have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world.

There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.

That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea--both of us calm--and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work....when death--black waves!--no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it.

You have the knowledge and ability to live sustainably on this planet but it's a hard road from where you are now. It's no longer a matter of what you know - you know enough. From here on, it's a test of whether you care - do you care enough?

To sit on a slab of Pennsylvania rock on the AT and watch a hawk rise dozens of feet above me with a simple tilt of a wing, then circle high above for hours on end was one of the greatest thrills I could imagine. And while it was romantic to believe that I was witnessing this majestic spectacle for free, it really came about because someone before me was willing to make it possible.

When his wounds cut too deep for the blues--when he couldn't sing himself out of his own sorrow--when he was too wounded to shimmy his fingers over piano keys--he came to the healing waters of the Alapaha River. And on the river he recounted his sins, confessing to the ancient rhythmic flow of the current. Communion.

Carrying the need to bow down and seek solace at the altar of nature, he had launched the canoe in the darkness. Tonight, his altar was the Alapaha River.

The purple haze of the wych elms; the blue flash of a kingfisher’s wings; the statuesque rightness of the milch cows in that green place chomping on the rich flood-grass.

In sum, it does not matter if we are forgotten; what matters is the effect we have on those around us and those who come after us. What matters is how our own lives affect the larger, perpetual community of the living.

Science makes discoveries when it admits to not knowing, poetry endures if it looks hard at real things. Nature writing, if such a thing exists, lives in this territory where science and poetry might meet. It must be made of both; it needs truth and beauty.