To Put Your Hands In

Watching The Animals Come And Go, And Feeling The Land Swell Up To Meet Them And Then Feeling It Grow Still At Their Departure, I Came To Think Of The Migrations As Breath, As The Land Breathing. In Spring A Great Inhalation Of Light And Animals. The Long-bated Breath Of Summer. And An Exhalation That Propelled Them All South In The Fall.

One Must Live In The Middle Of Contradiction, Because If All Contradiction Were Eliminated At Once, Life Would Collapse. There Are Simply No Definitive Answers To Some Of The Great Pressing Questions. You Continue To Live Them Out Making Your Life A Worthy Expression Of Leaning Into The Light.

Because You Have Seen Something Doesn't Mean You Can Explain It. Differing Interpretations Will Always Abound, Even When Good Minds Come To Bear. The Kernel Of Indisputable Information Is A Dot In Space; Interpretations Grow Out Of The Desire To Make This Point A Line, To Give It Direction. The Directions In Which It Can Be Sent, The Uses To Which It Can Be Put By A Culturally, Professionally, And Geographically Diverse Society Are Almost Without Limit. The Possibilities Make Good Scientists Chary.

Conversations Are Efforts Toward Good Relations. They Are An Elementary Form Of Reciprocity. They Are The Exercise Of Our Love For Each Other. They Are The Enemies Of Our Loneliness, Our Doubt, Our Anxiety, Our Tendencies To Abdicate. To Continue To Be In Good Conversation Over Our Enormous And Terrifying Problems Is To Be Calling Out To Each Other In The Night. If We Attend With Imagination And Devotion To Our Conversations, We Will Find What We Need; And Someone Among Us Will Act—it Does Not Matter Whom—and We Will Survive.

One Of The Great Dreams Of Man Must Be To Find Some Place Between The Extremes Of Nature And Civilization Where It Is Possible To Live Without Regret.