Freshwater For Flowers Quotes

Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?

Today, cardinal-flower is a legally protected species and should never be picked or removed from the wild.

When one is in the woods, on a day like this, one feels altogether connected again to the very fabric of the world. The green, calming canopy of branches and leaves overhead lets sunlight trickle through from above in just the right dose, and the breeze is filtered through miles and miles of trees and bush and carries the scent of every flowering dogwood and every freshwater spring and pond, mingling with every lake and river and stream and every good creature that walks through the halls of the forest. In the woods, one senses there is no evil, no greed, no tyrant, no oppressor, no malady, but indeed a deep wellspring of meaning returns. To be connected to the woods is to be connected to the very art of life itself, and to walk along the stones and mosses, and under the tall trees and over the fallen trees and alongside the wet, rotten stumps is to be reminded of the great circus mystery and magic of being itself.

The earliest relics at Jericho date to an era before humans invented pottery, around 9500 b.c.e., a millennium and a half earlier than the pits of Aberdeenshire’s Warren Field. In antiquity, people came to Jericho for two reasons: a freshwater spring and the Moon. Jericho’s spring, now named Ein es-Sultan, was a popular gathering spot for the hunter-gatherer people called the Natufians. Beyond its life-giving waters, a spring is also a potent symbol for people fixated on human fertility, as we know many Neolithic people were. Like other early hunter-gatherer groups, the Natufians are known by the tiny stone tools they left behind. They are called lunates: small crescent-shaped stones used to cut grasses. Natufian hunter-gatherer groups visited the Jericho spring in warm seasons. Around 9600 b.c.e., a period of droughts and cold called the Younger Dryas finally ended, and the Natufians stayed put in Jericho. The oldest city on Earth grew up around these water seekers. Befitting the spring’s connection to fertility rituals, Jericho became a pilgrimage site for worshippers of the Moon. Scholars have a few theories for the origin of the city’s name—some say it derives from a word meaning “fragrant,” describing its abundant flowers—but the Palestinian government’s tourism office describes Jericho as “the City of the Moon.” Jericho was an early center of worship for a Canaanite god named Yarikh, a god represented by the Moon. People traveled to the city to visit a temple to his honor. This may also explain the origins of other proto-cities of the third millennium b.c.e. The temple probably came first, and a city stirred to life in the buildings erected around it.