To me, a collector of nature quotes of power and beauty, the following passage by Meridel Le Sueur is one of the most beautiful I’ve come across.

The owl rides the meadow at his hunting hour. The fox clears out the pheasants and the partridges in the cornfield. Jupiter rests above Antares, and the fall moon hooks itself into the prairie sod. A dark wind flows down from Mandan as the Indians slowly move out of the summer campground to go back to the reservation. Aries, buck of the sky, leaps to the outer rim and mates with earth. Root and seed turn into flesh. We turn back to each other in the dark together, in the short days, in the dangerous cold, on the rim of a perpetual wilderness.
- Meridel LeSueur, from an essay entitled “The Ancient People and the Newly Come”, in the book Growing Up In Minnesota.

Meridel was a great force of energy unlike anyone I’ve ever met. When she walked into a room, the whole dynamic changed. People were drawn to her warmth, her very presence. She uplifted us all. We loved her, we loved ourselves. She always engaged with us, taught us, energized us, challenged us to create a new world based on social justice, respect for one another, and love for our home, the earth.
- from Meridel Lesueur, A Remembrance by Neala Schleuning.

Have you ever known someone who devoted their life to what they saw as truth, gentleness and peace? And lived a life full of setbacks, ups and downs, and yet persisted with their vision of what humans were capable of? And ultimately triumphed in the sense that Walt Whitman meant it.
Meridel Le Sueur was such a person.

Horace Traubel, biographer of Walt Whitman, once asked Whitman, "Suppose the whole damned thing went up in smoke, Walt, would you consider your life a failure?"

            Whitman's response: "Not a bit of it. . .No life is a failure. I have done the work: I have thrown my life into the work:. . . my single simple life: utting it up for what it was worth: into the book -- pouring it into the book: honestly, without stint, giving the book all, all, all: why should I call it a failure? Why? Why? I don't think a man can be so easily wrecked a that."'

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I’m dividing A Pause For Beauty into two different e-journals, “A Pause For Beauty” and “Creativity As A Way of Life”. If you currently receive an email each time I publish A Pause For Beauty, then you are automatically signed up for A Pause For Beauty, but not the Creativity e-journal.

To read about the difference between the two, and sign up for “Creativity As A Way Of Life”, visit the home page here. Or you can just sign up here. Going forward, the Creativity Journal will be published one or two times a week; A Pause For Beauty four or five times.

Why is this change you ask? Most Pause For Beauty readers don’t appear particularly interested in the Creativity posts based on comments, numbers forwarded, donations in support of the work, number of unsubscribes, and number of link clicks. Nevertheless, I’m fascinated by the subject and want to explore it.