A journal of a gardener in Round Rock, Texas learning how to deal with clay and limestone "soil" and the heat! Whew! But also the joy that comes from getting out in the garden and enjoying nature and family.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The River
I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever
At the bottom of my dream
Henry David Thoreau,
Journals (1906), 1842 entry.
The face of the river, in time, became a wonderful book . . . which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Mark Twain,
Life on the Mississippi
Ran over stones;
My ears knew
An early joy.
And all the waters
Of all the streams
Sang in my veins
That summer day.
Theodore Roethke,
The Waking
The sea sings.
Oceans roar.
Tides rise
Who am I?
A small pebble on the grand shore;
Who am I?
To ask who I am.
Isn’t it enough to be?
Native American saying
and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you,
you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.
A. A. Milne,
Pooh's Little Instruction Book
and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water,
rivers remembered and rivers imagined.
Rivers course through my dreams,
rivers cold and fast,
rivers well-known and rivers nameless,
rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys,
narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows,
rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain's belly,
sculpted the land,
peeled back the planet's history
exposing the texture of time itself.
Harry Middleton,
Rivers of Memory
Was half your glory sung;
And never skill of painter’s brush
Nor praise of poet’s tongue
Shall half reveal the majesty,
The charm, the primal grace
That clothe you and attend your ways
And shine from out your face.
Frederick Oakes Sylvester,
Principia College
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