As I watch'd the ploughman ploughing, Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting, I saw there, too, O life and death, your analogies; (Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)
~ Walt Whitman, "As I Watche'd The Ploughman Ploughing,” in LEAVES OF GRASS
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We are all native speakers of the language of life. To talk with what lives, we have to listen patiently and quietly for a long time. We have to listen in a place where we can hear, where the sounds of the living world are louder than the sounds of the machine world. If we have the patience and the silence we can begin to hear. If many of us listen, many of us will hear. We will learn the language of the living Earth, and it will become our language again.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton