All Nature Is Your Congratulation

Raiph Vaughan Williams: A Pastoral Symphony

If the day and the night
are such that you greet
them with joy, and life emits
a fragrance like flowers
and sweet-scented herbs,
is more elastic, more starry, more immortal---that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them.
They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real
are never communicated
by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible

and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.
It is a little stardust caught,
a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
--Henry David Thoreau
Walden, or Life in the Woods


pelicans at Pyramid Lake

sage and friends

Thumper surveys the harvest

giant delphinium

The IBKC*


*Itty Bitty Kitty Committee
(An abandoned cat had her kittens in the storeroom on Labor Day weekend.) See also "Project Mayhem".