I turned off the light and drifted into that floating sensation, not asleep but drowsy, half awake and half asleep. Often, while in this state -- lovely, unknown faces float before me -- but this morning the experience was different. A perfect face of a child came before me in profile -- then it turned and smiled at me. It was glowing with light and seemed to fill my own head with light. I was aglow and excited and thought, "This must be the Christos"; but something within me, without sound, said, "No, this is you." I feel I will never be the same again and some day I may experience the "Promise".
The song of a river ordinarily means the tune that waters play on rock, root, and rapid....This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over the rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it--a vast pulsing harmony--its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
~ Aldo Leopold, "Song of the Gavilan" in A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC
