We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.

I know I hit it. It reared up on its hind legs. It was as big as you and me.

The swimming dinosaur had four limbs and it walked on its hind legs, which each had three toes. The tracks show how it became more buoyant as it waded into deeper water -- the full footprints gradually become half-footprints and then only claw marks.

He was just moving his front end, and his hind legs sort of moved shakily behind him, ... It was really cute.

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.

the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.