Animals, Trees, and Stones

Nature can heal. Sometimes we need a break from information coming at us, or the practical needs of life. In the foreword to Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animal with animals. … One way to stop seeing trees, or river, or hills only as ‘natural resources,’ is to class them as fellow beings – kinfolk.”

 

“Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both sense of the of the word ‘for.’… So we admit stones to our holy communion; so the stones may admit us to theirs.”