When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
Naturally, this unseasonably warm weather has had me itching to go on a hike in my favorite place. So a couple days after Christmas, I decided we would take advantage of one of the last wildly mild days of my time in Kentucky and check out a new spot in Red River Gorge. So my brother, Alan, my fiancé, Ryan, and I set out to Grays Arch on a 65-degree December morning.
Read More“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
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