I love the way butterflies slit themselves up into little black lines and then flash! –Open up those beautiful wide wings! One poet compared their wings to parasols opening,

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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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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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Someday I will have a field of sunflowers. I would never put them in a vase because they are too big and they belong in a sunflower field after all. They are too big and electric with light and sun to go into a vase. Van Gogh knew that, which is why he got so crazy just drawing a simple vase full of simple sunflowers.

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Then as I thought about Hopkins’ words and kept looking around me, I understood what he meant. Gerald Manley Hopkins meant that speckled things or dappled things and striped things or brinded things are all around you, and they are beautiful in their own way.

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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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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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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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