One day I can hear the faint rustle of autumn coming. The next day I can’t. One evening summer leaks away into the cool night sky, but the next morning it’s back again. But there is headway. Birdsong has gone, and is【46】______ (replace) by a whining bag-piping of insect creation. I look out across the pasture as dusk【47】______(begin) and see a shining galaxy of airborne bugs. What would it be like, I wonder, to have an【48】aware______of the actual number of insects on this farm？
I ask myself a version of this question every day: "Have you ever really looked at…？”You can【49】______in the blank yourself.
Every day I am blinded by【50】familiar______. I open our beehive, which is filled with honey, and the particularity of the honeybees, and even of their community, somehow escapes me, if only because I’ve been living with honeybees a good part of my life. I remember the phrase, "keep your eyes【51】______ (peel) , ”and maybe that’s what I need, a good peeling.
Again and【52】______, I find myself trying to really look at what I' m seeing. It happened the other afternoon, high on a nearby mountain. A dragonfly had settled on the denuded tip of a pine bough. It clung, still as only a dragonfly can be. Then it flicked upward and caught a midge and settled on the bough again, adjusting【53】______(precise) to the wind. I see dragonflies【54】______ (quiver) in the insect clouds above my pasture, too. I am always aware, however , that there’s no such thing as really looking.
What I want to see is invisible anyway: the prehistoric depth of time embodied in the form. of those dragonflies, the pressure of life itself, the web of【55】______(relate) that bind us all together. I find myself trying to【56】wit______the moment when the accident of life becomes a continued purpose. But this is a small farm, and, being human, 1 keep【57】______(come) up against the limits of what a human can see.
This morning I found a spider resting—or perhaps hunting—on the leaf of a hydrangea, the axis of the spider’s abdomen perfectly aligned with the axis of the leaf. What I noticed was the symmetry of their placement, the way spider, and leaf resembled【58】_____other. What I wanted to determine was the spider’s intent. If I【59】c______, I would have asked it, "What are you doing？” Or, better yet, "Who are you？” But all I could do was look—and realizing that I was looking—make the【60】b______of what I’d seen.
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