We Are Made One with What We Touch and See

Plant Life Winner

Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards

WILDERNESS TRAIL

Nantahala National Forest, North Carolina, USA

by Lori Kincaid

Hot Springs, North Carolina, USA

We are resolved into the supreme air, 
We are made one with what we touch and see, 
With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair, 
With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree 
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range 
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change. 

With beat of systole and of diastole 
One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart, 
And mighty waves of single Being roll 
From nerveless germ to man, for we are part 
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, 
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill 

One sacrament are consecrate, the earth 
Not we alone hath passions hymeneal, 
The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth 
At daybreak know a pleasure not less real 
Than we do, when in some fresh blossoming wood 
We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good 

Is the light vanished from our golden sun, 
Or is this daedal fashioned earth less fair, 
That we are nature's heritors, and one 
With every pulse of life that beats the air? 
Rather new suns across the sky shall pass, 
New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass. 

And we two lovers shall not sit afar, 
Critics of nature, but the joyous sea 
Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star 
Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be 
Part of the mighty universal whole, 
And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!. 

We shall be notes in that great Symphony 
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres, 
And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be 
One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years 
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die, 
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!. 

Oscar Wilde

Wild Lands