My eye fell on this poem this morning. Beneath the Snow, the Badger's Steady Breathing Beneath the snow, the badger's steady breathing. He does not count the cold as cold. He does not call his hunger fate. He sett is neither large nor small. Not dark. Closer to tree root than human. Closer to the wilderness than to its saints who sought to learn from where they'd moved. A life uninterrupting, without want or aspiration. A persistence. And yet not meager. Not unfeeling. -- Sharp starlight coming all the way down to the snow. - Jane Hirshfield from AFTER (February 2006)