A forest meadow on Mount Lemmon is surrounded by quaking Aspens, these white-barked trees that keep waving their yellow hands back and forth. So many leaves quake at once that it feels as if you’re sitting in quaking yellow polka dots.

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Personally I love rabbits. I’m always happy to come upon one, even though when a rabbit sees me, he’ll usually freeze and hide in plain sight like a two-year-old child. I love their bright black eyes and their round dewdrop bodies, punctuated by those unlikely Popsicle ears and big Clarabelle feet.

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April picks up her color crayons and throws all of them away except for one, and then she colors it all yellow. Palo verde trees hang heavy with yellow, yellow falls all over their feet, yellow creates a carpet beneath them, as if it had snowed yellow snow.

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I love the way saguaros just stand in stoic silence, even in the broiling desert sun. You can learn from their silence. As Eckhart Tolle writes in his book, Stillness Speaks, “We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals know. We have forgotten how to be. How to be still.

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We sense a cosmic force that is always with us, the force that Buber calls love. We can have an I-Thou encounter not only with other human beings, but also animals, flowers, rocks, the sky … whatever. Every I-Thou encounter we have connects us to something other than ourselves. Every I-Thou encounter opens our hearts to the ultimate encounter with the “Thou” of the universe, the God of Love.

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I watch his beautiful glowing eyes and his muscular tawny body, and something about the Tucson jaguar is bright and burning. The Aztecs, who had elite Jaguar Knights, believed something similar about the jaguar too. They believed the jaguar gave fire to humankind.

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But the owls next door are different. They stare back at me as if they wish I’d fly away. They stare back at me with those eyes — oh! those yellow eyes! with big straight eyebrows that tilted up, as if they’re making strategies for Wall Street.

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All of a sudden the Ramsey Canyon forest looks foreboding! The squirrel just stares at me. He knows the forest is playing tricks on my mind, and he also knows I stepped on the snake first.

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After all, you go back to Yosemite, as Muir said, “to hear the waterfalls and birds and winds sing … to interpret the rocks, to learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche … and to get as near the heart of the world as you can.” This is hard to do when you’re standing under a waterfall and getting soaked.

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If you don’t talk to the animals, they won’t talk back to you, then you won’t understand, and when you don’t understand you will fear, and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.

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