Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence

by Ann O'Shaughnessy and Cleo Qian

Book Overview

Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence is a collection of hundreds of quotes on the beauty and mystery of the natural world by writers and thinkers, including Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933937114
• ISBN13: 9781933937113
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Heron Dance Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 8.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Lovely

The book was beautifully composed. Wonderful watercolors and thoughtfully chosen prose. I was going to give it to a friend, but I think I will keep it myself.

Nature and Silence Feed the Soul

Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence edited by Roderick MacIver and Ann O'Shaughnessy is a retreat between two covers. It is an eclectic collection of insights into the quality and nature of silence and of the silence in nature. There is peace in this book illustrated with watercolors by Canadian-born MacIver, who founded the publishing house Heron Dance in 1995 to publish books such as this one. Hundreds of sources as diverse as Science Digest, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rachel Carson, Tagore, and TuFu give voice to a shared and multi-faceted experience. It is like a cool and beautiful river that offers refreshment at whatever point you jump in. "There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter," says Rachel Carson. "Thus the light rains, thus pours,/The liquid and rushing crystal/beneath the knees of the gods," says Ezra Pound in Canto IV. What is a luscious book about the richness of nature without something scientific and poetic from Stephen Jay Gould? Hear this: "Many great extinctions...have set basic patterns in the history of life, imparting an essential randomness to our evolutionary pageant." A pattern of randomness. This is science speaking to the soul, and it's why we need beautiful books that place seemingly random things side by side to let our minds make the connections, to fill the spaces with meaning, to free our hearts that we might, in the words of Li Po, be "like a peach blossom/in the flowing stream/going by/in the depths/in another world/not among m