The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

Praise is not a goal, but the constant purpose of being alive. We praise by ritual, by walking, by grieving, by eating, by kissing the babies, by admiring the conniving bull snake

our actions, speech, thoughts, everyday actions, and gratitude mattered.

Praise was the only nutrient we humans had to give to that which gave us life,

Praise was not just a spoken thing; it was a doing thing.

A lot of would-be changers of the world’s ills live their entire lives not as praise, but as a big fat ongoing complaint.

When we have been waiting for years for something to happen in our lives that will make us want to praise our being alive, it should occur to us that we ourselves should become like a long-awaited Rain on Dust, on the Dry Dust of a culture and way of being whose people generation after generation keep the ground free of the tears of grief and the t

human fear of the unpredictable

Having lost the natural world as our mother, we modern people are all orphans.

If your mind becomes stupid and sarcastic because you’ve no previous talent with eloquence, or for turning grief and loss into outloud praise for the wild or anything else, then stop being like that! Try to change. Begin to see that an honest feeling of grief in your heart for a loss of what you love should become master or mistress of your tongue.