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.)
This is thy hour, O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless. Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done. Thee fully forth emerging silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.
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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