The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8

by Beth Brower

“Inmates, rather, in the jail called life.”

We need the tonic of wildness… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

“All things that love the sun are out of doors.”

“How did you know it was I sitting here?” I asked after a minute had passed. “Because,” he took in a breath, his hand rising with his chest, “you slip through time.” He was soon again asleep. And I was left thinking that was perhaps the loveliest spell I’d ever heard.

I needed to reclaim that which it had once given me.” “Which was?” “Solitude of the deepest kind,” Islington shrugged. “Independence of soul not simply of choice, a natural line of beauty, serendipity.”

That every day should leave some part Free for a sabbath of the heart.

This makes me cry. It makes me want to slow down my life.