More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
~ Jane Hirshfield from "Optimism" in GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT: POEMS
One's relationship to nature is a deeply personal experience. To some it's best represented by a walk in the park, or along the river, or under a summer night's sky. To others it reaches its pinnacle in the study of a smell, a sound, the sight of a bird's egg, a gray whale, or lodgepole pine. And while all of nature is laid out before us to appreciate, not all is understood, known, or even knowable. But about human nature we do know at least one thing, which is that it embodies an irrepressible and infinite ability to create, to express, to give, and to share.
~ Al Gore in THE NATURE OF NATURE by William H. Shore
