This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music
in these hills, by no means audible to all.... On a still night, when the
campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly
and listen ... 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
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality
when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or
ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you
is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every
individual in these millions and millions about only one thing...