The search which we make for this
quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person,
and the crux of any
individual person’s story. It is the search
for those moments and situations
when we are most alive.

—Christopher Alexander,
“The Timeless Way of Building”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things . . .
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

—Wendell Berry