I spent Sunday morning with some new friends searching for American Dippers along the rushing snow-melted torrents of the upper Animas above Silverton.  We were doing research for the American Dipper Project locating nests and bird activity to help document healthy sections of the beleaguered river.  It was a good place to be following the news of the tragedy in Orlando.

John Muir wrote of the American Dipper that they “seem so completely part and parcel of the streams they inhabit, they scarce suggest any other origin than the streams themselves; and one might almost be pardoned in fancying they come direct from the living waters, like flowers from the ground.”

I have no answers for days like this when evil seems to overshadow kindness and innocent lives are violently killed by hatred and ignorance. I have no answers, but it seemed a good place to be Sunday morning in the mountains among friends and raging rivers and the diminutive dippers.

Wendell Berry once wrote,

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of …water.  And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”