Miracles of Cold Rivers ...

“We forget that (lichen) nature  itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”

 In his beautiful 1948 manifesto for breaking the tyranny of technology and relearning to be nourished by nature, Henry Beston lamented: “What has come over our age is an   alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality   and all but cost us our humanity.” And yet his admonition fell on ears increasingly   unhearing as the decades rolled on with their so-called progress.  


The poet Jane Hirshfield captured this in her stirring anthem against the silencing of nature: “The silence spoke loudly of silence, / and the rivers kept speaking, / of cold rivers, of boulders and air.”