Melrose

“What if resting, all by itself, is the real act of holiness? What if honoring the gift of
our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe? The natural world has never
needed us more than it needs us now, but we can’t be of much use to it if we remain in a perpetual state of exhaustion and despair.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all
there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“With both fiction and birds, I think about existence, the span of life, from conception to birth to survival to death to remembrance by others. I reflect on mortality, the strangeness of it, the inevitability. I do that daily, and not with dread, but with awareness that life contains ephemeral moments, which can be saved in words and images, there for pondering, for reviving the bird and my heart.”
― Amy Tan, The Backyard Bird Chronicles

“Pull up a weed from the wet soil of the drenched garden and smell the rich life the earthworm has left behind. Just a whiff of it will flood you with a feeling of well-being. The microbes in freshly turned soil stimulate serotonin production, working on the human brain the same way antidepressants do.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year