Teach me the power and strength of silence
that I may go into the world
as still as a mouse
in the depths of my heart.
~ Mechtild of Magdeburg
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, a stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by biologists and antiquarians chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit — not a fossil earth but a living earth.