“The Peace of Wild Things When despair for the world 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 with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” ~ Wendell Berry
“Paracelsus gave much thought to the effect of imagination on the life of man. He associated the term with the word “magic,” declaring that “determined imagination is the beginning of all magical operations.” He went on to explain that the imaginative power is sustained by the action of the will. He insisted that to imagine and believe are necessary to the perfection of all arts and sciences. It would appear, therefore, that by imagination, Paracelsus implied a kind of internal visualization, the courage to extend the faculties of the mind into the unknown; to discover something of the infinite potential of universal consciousness.“
