Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.
--Gary Snyder
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
~ Blaise Pascal ~
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Waiting_to_Be_Known.html
The heron, unseen for weeks, came flying wide-winged toward
me, settled just offshore on his post, took up his vigil. If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit, I have no answer.
--Denise Levertov
Moses sees the bush as it actually is. . . . All that is living burns.
This is the fundamental fact of nature. And Moses saw it with
his own two eyes directly. That glimpse of the real world —of
the world as it is known to God —is not a world of isolated
things but of processes in concert. God tells Moses, "Take
off your shoes, because the ground where you are standing
is holy ground." He is asking Moses to experience in his own
body what the burning bush experiences: a living connection
between heaven and earth, the life that stretches out like taffy
between our father the sun and our mother the earth. If you
do not believe this, take off your shoes and stand in the grass
or in the sand or in the dirt.
--William Bryant Logan
I woke up in the middle of the night and climbed out of the
tent to make coffee. There was no sound save the wind and, in
all that space, not one light, just a scant new moon that hung
in the sky like a fine silk thread. The twentieth century had
vanished. I raised my cup in a toast.
--Richard West
It is horrifying that we have to fight our government to save
the environment.
--Ansel Adams
I used to talk about running out of things and say, "No one
believes we’re running out of anything. I think we’re running
out of everything. We’re running out of out." Out is where my
parents threw their garbage. You threw the garbage out. You
can’t throw the garbage out anymore. Out is where your children
are going to live, where your grandchildren are going to live.
--Willard Gaylin
If I were to spit upon the revered black stone in Mecca during
the height of the annual pilgrimage, I would be slain on
the spot by enraged pilgrims for daring to profane the sacred
symbol of Islam. An Israeli soldier’ bullet in the back would
be my deserved fate for scrawling graffiti upon the Wailing
Wall in Jerusalem. . . . Life would not be pleasant for me if I
took a hammer to the Pietà in the Vatican, for we humans
hold our creations dear, and we deal harshly with those who
fail to share our reverence for old stone walls, meteorites,
marble statues, icons, and architecture. . . . Yet each and
every day, humans enter the most sacred and reverential
cathedrals of the natural world —the redwood forests of
northern California or the rain forests of Amazonia —and
each and every day we profanely rape these great mysteries
with chain saws and bulldozers.
--Paul Watson
Humankind —despite its artistic pretensions, its sophistication,
and its many accomplishments —owes its existence to
a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
--Source unknown
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics,
conviviality, and so on —have found that none of these finally
satisfy, or permanently wear —what remains? Nature remains.
--William Wadsworth
more photos by Alan Larus: http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/islands/blue.htm
http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/islands/green.htm