Aldo Leopold

Last year I had a student in my yoga class who most often wore a t-shirt that said A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold. I asked about it and he said that Aldo Leopold is one of his heroes. I became curious and bought the little book, A Sand County Almanac, written in 1949. It is written so beautifully and poetically!

Here are a few snapshots from the book:

"It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any of them."

"I sit in happy meditation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook. Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false. How utterly dull would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!"

"A sense of history should be the most precious gift of science and of the arts, but I suspect that the grebe, who has neither, knows more history than we do. His dim primordial brain knows nothing of who won the Battle of Hastings, but it seems to sense who won the battle of time."

"In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with. Nothing is more monotonous than the juniper foothills, until some veteran of a thousand summers, laden blue with berries, explodes in a blue burst of chattering jays. The drab sogginess of a March cornfield, saluted by one honker from the sky, is drab no more."

Absolutely great spring day reading when the birds are announcing their brilliant presence.