"And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into hummus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as is ink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed inter reaching of the treetops, the leaves falling - and then that, too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace."
From Wendell Berry’S 1968 essay entitled “A Native Hill”

"Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?"
Wendell Berry

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
Wendell Berry