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Believe nothing that cannot be proved.
Respect nothing that cannot be understood.
Value nothing that cannot be sold.
The lesser gods, the green leaves, the wind, the whole water
brotherhood-all of them-were searching for me. After all, how
can I prove that the black geese fly by the stars when the stars
are behind the clouds? How can I understand that the bumblebee
flies when science says that it cannot? For that matter, can
I put a value upon the tight, exciting knot in my stomach when
I see a dog on point? None of this advances any stock market
nor earns interest. I live in a world where money is life's report
card.
The answer is the same as in shooting: trust your instinct; more
by faith, less by sight.
Civilization has piled layers and layers of gray matter on top
of it, but curled up in a quiet corner of my mind there is the
voice of the morning wind, warning of sea storms. There was a
time when my ear could divine the pads of a hunting beast. My
hair, now so barber cut and dry, was once a messenger of direction
when combed by the wind. Inside my chest, in a quiet corner of
my heart, in the blood of my body, a part of the water brotherhood
lives today. This human form is thousands of years old. Some
small element of me has heard all the songs, sailed the cold
seas, and survived the storms. I know this is true because I
am here today.
If I want to hear the small voices, then I must listen in the
quiet. It is a hard thing to do because in today's world it is
more important to know the levers and knobs of the big engines.
The search is no longer for food and life; it is the quest for
money with money, all the things made by the big engines can
be bought. The machine sound is now the sound of survival. If
the power fails, the machine noise is gone. Suddenly, everything
else that was thought to be mute, docile, and tamed, has a sound.
The old voices are always there; they're just overwhelmed by
the white noise of progress.
Consider this:
A coin tossed into the air, the petals plucked from a daisy,
the open pages of a fallen book, are not read as statistical
noise; but as signs, messages, a dialogue with eternity.
-Gabriel Zaid
More voices of lesser gods.
Sometimes these ancient voices reach out to me, linking my childhood
to who I am and connecting me to the people who went before me.
Within them, if the night is quiet and the grass is new, float
sounds like spring peepers or perhaps a summer robin or, later
in the night, a night hawk. Or maybe there's a siren, if the
weekend is busy and the night is hot. In the fall, there might
be a dog, a mile away, tied up outside and not happy about it.
These
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