"I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better."

You may also like:

• 

  Billy Collins
  Poet

• 

  Edna St. Vincent Millay
  Poet

• 

  Emily Dickinson
  Poet

• 

  Henry David Thoreau
  Author

• 

  Krista Tippett
  Broadcaster

• 

  Naomi Shihab Nye
  Poet

• 

  W. S. Merwin
  Poet

• 

  Walt Whitman
  Poet

• 

  Wendell Berry
  Novelist