Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
-- by Annie Dillard

Night is rising in the valley; the creek has been extinguished for an  
hour, and now only the naked tips of trees fire tapers into the sky  
like trails of sparks.

     -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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Nature is, above all, profligate.  Don't believe them wen they tell  
you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the  
soil.  Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first  
place?  This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the  
brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital.   
Extravagance!  Nature will try anything once.
  
  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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I sip my coffee.  I look at the mountain, which is still doing its  
tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person  
who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond  
nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret  
astonishment that you are now strangers.  Thanks.  For the memories.   

  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as  
separating us from our creator -- our very self-consciousness -- is  
also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures.  It was  
a biter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again.  Just  
think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our  
planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.  I have to  
acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained  
altar stone.  We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living  
on jetsam.  We are escapees.  We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep  
with a mouthful of blood.

  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a  
species that I can hardly believe that they evolved.  Other creatures  
manage to have effective matings and even stable societies without  
great emotions, and they have a bonus in that they need not ever  
mourn.  (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are  
similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn  
their dead.  Why do that to an otter?   What creator could be so  
cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?)  It would seem that  
emotions are the curse, not death -- emotions that appear to have  
devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence.

  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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The muskrat never twitched -  he never knew I was there.  I never knew  
I was there, either.  For that forty minutes last night I was as  
purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate.  I received  
impressions, but I did not print out captions -  And I have often  
noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is  
tremendously invigorating.  I wonder if we do not waste most of our  
energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to  
ourselves.  Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, "When  
you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from  
all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks  
of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified  
and become a holy fire in you."

  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible  
earnest.  By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and  
fleet.  There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.   

  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever  
you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable 
he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who  
carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a  
live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will  
not part.

  -- Anne Diller, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek

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