Midweek Meditation

“The song of a river ordinarily means the tune that water plays on rock, root and rapid.  This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all.  To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of the hills and rivers.  Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand.  Then you may hear it—a vast, pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.” 
— Aldo Leopold