Former World

"Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways.  They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the thin band in which are the all but indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo and now. Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death. [...] Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history."

- John McPhee (1931 - )
Basin and Range

Terrestrial Gaze

"Seeing. One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing - if not ultimately, at least essentially. To be more is to be more united - and this sums up and is the very conclusion of the work to follow. But unity grows, and we will affirm this again, only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more. Are not the perfection of an animal and the supremacy of the thinking being measured by the penetration and power of synthesis of their glance? To try to see more and to see better is not, therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence. And thus, to a higher degree, this is the human condition."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
The Phenomenon of Man

Nameless Thicket

"Tangled thickets of wiry bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep fissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parched growth of distorted cactus trees. [...] change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. [...] Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky."

- Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)
The Encantadas

Immense Silence

 "But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am lost. Not a silence so much as a great stillness - for there are few sounds: the croak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist - slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace. A suspension of time, a continuous present. If I look at the small device strapped to my wrist the numbers, even the sweeping second hand, seem meaningless, almost ridiculous. No travelers, no campers, no wanderers have come to this part of the desert today and for a few moments I feel and realize that I am very much alone."

- Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)

Luminous Insistence

"In some photographs the essence of light and space dominate; in others, the substance of rock and wood, and the luminous insistence of growing things ... It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to spectators."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Journey of a Thousand Miles

"The giant pine tree
grows from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet"

- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

A Sea of Looking-Glass

"But when ... he cast his eyes around him, the most horrible despair was infused into his soul. Before him stretched an ocean without limit. The dark sand of the desert spread further than eye could reach in every direction, and glittered like steel struck with bright light. It might have been a sea of looking-glass, or lakes melted together in a mirror. A fiery vapor carried up in surging waves made a perpetual whirlwind over the quivering land. The sky was lit with an Oriental splendor of insupportable purity, leaving naught for the imagination to desire. Heaven and earth were on fire.

The silence was awful in its wild and terrible majesty. Infinity, immensity, closed in upon the soul from every side. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a flaw on the bosom of the sand, ever moving in diminutive waves; the horizon ended as at sea on a clear day, with one line of light, definite as the cut of a sword."

- Honoré de Balzac (1799 - 1850)

Life and Sound

"Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once…Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound."

- Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)

Old Wood

"The whole world is, to me, very much 'alive' - all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can't look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life - the things going on - within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Through the Silence Something...

"I have always loved the desert.
One sits down on a desert sand dune,
sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet
through the silence something
throbs, and gleams..."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 - 1944)

Magnificent Desolation

"'Isn’t that something!' Neil gushed. 'Magnificent sight out here.'

I slowly allowed my eyes to drink in the unusual majesty of the moon. In its starkness and monochromatic hues, it was indeed beautiful. But it was a different sort of beauty than I had ever before seen. Magnificent, I thought, then said, 'Magnificent desolation.' It was a spontaneous utterance, an oxymoron that would take on ever-deeper dimensions of meaning in describing this strange new environment.

Turning in Neil’s direction, I tried out a few steps and a couple of short jumps to test my maneuverability and recovery, and to figure out the best way to maintain my balance. With the heavy backpack altering my center of mass, I leaned slightly forward in the direction I was moving to keep from falling backwards.

Then for the first time since stepping on the surface, I looked upward, above the LM. It was not an easy thing to do in a pressurized suit, inflated as stiff as a football, with a gold sun visor jutting out from my helmet. But I managed to direct my view homeward, and there in the black, starless sky I could see our marble-sized planet, no bigger than my thumb.

I became all the more conscious that here we were, two guys walking on the moon, our every move being watched by more people than had ever before viewed one single event. In a strange way there was an indescribable feeling of proximity and connection between us and everyone back on Earth."

- Buzz Aldrin (1930 - )
Magnificent Desolation

Nature's Sculpture

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."

- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

One Seen as Many

"Being the one, the universal Soul is present in all beings. Though one, It is seen as many, like the moon in the water ... Just as it is the jar which being removed (from one place to another) changes places and not the Akasha ['fifth element' or ether] enclosed in the jar – so is the Jiva [individual, embodied soul] which resembles the Akasha ...When various forms like the jar are broken again and again the Akasha does not know them to be broken, but He knows perfectly. Being covered by Maya [cosmic illusion that veils the true nature of reality], which is a mere sound, It does not, through darkness, know the Akasha (the Blissful one). When ignorance is rent asunder, It being then Itself only sees the unity."

- Amritabindu Upanishad (100 BCE to 300 CE)

The Great Silence

"The first going-down into the desert is always something of a surprise. The fancy has pictured one thing; the reality shows quite another thing. Where and how did we gain the idea that the desert was merely a sea of sand? ...The dunes are always rhythmical and flowing in their forms, and for color the desert has nothing that surpasses them. In the early morning, before the sun is up, they are air blue, reflecting the sky overhead; at noon they are pale lines of dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating in the heated air; at sunset they are often flooded with a rose or mauve color; under a blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in the northern seas.

...

The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but do-day people admit its truth; and the grandeur of the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the desert gives it proof.

...

All, all to dust again; and
no man knoweth the
why thereof."

- John Charles Van Dyke (1856–1932)
The Desert

Color Bridge

"I believe I have already suggested that color is the most obvious bridge between emotion and perception, that is, between subjective experience of the psyche and quality objective in nature. Both light up only between the extremes of light and darkness, and in their reciprocal interplay. Thus, outward the rainbow - or, if you prefer it, the spectrum - is the bridge between dark and light, but inwardly the rainbow is, what the soul itself is, the bridge between body and spirit, between earth and heaven."

- Owen Barfield (1898 - 1997)

Everything is Flowing

"...everything is flowing—going somewhere,
animals and so-called lifeless
rocks as well as water."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

Light, Shadow, Time

"Our job is to record, each in his own way,
this world of light and shadow and time
that will never come again exactly
as it is today."

- Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)

Nature's Mirror

"In this secluded spot the soothing silence,
Far from the clank of crowds, I stand or sit, musing,
Thoughts that are the hymns of the praise of things,
Largely learn’d from nature’s schooling.
Give me again O nature your primal sanities!
Thou hast, O nature! elements!
Utterance to my heart beyond the rest.
...
Somehow I feel the globe itself swift-swimming in space.
I merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day,
Never before did I get so close to nature—
absolute and unqualified acceptance of nature—
Never before did she come so close to me.
...
The mirror that nature holds is deep and floating
and ethereal and faithful, I see
my soul reflected in nature."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
"The Poet in Nature"

The Intuitive Mind

"The difference between the mathematical and the intuitive mind.—In the one the principles are palpable, but removed from ordinary use; so that for want of habit it is difficult to turn one's mind in that direction: but if one turns it thither ever so little, one sees the principles fully, and one must have a quite inaccurate mind who reasons wrongly from principles so plain that it is almost impossible they should escape notice ... But in the intuitive mind the principles are found in common use, and are before the eyes of everybody. One has only to look, and no effort is necessary; it is only a question of good eyesight, but it must be good, for the principles are so subtle and so numerous, that it is almost impossible but that some escape notice.

...

All mathematicians would then be intuitive if they had clear sight, for they do not reason incorrectly from principles known to them; and intuitive minds would be mathematical if they could turn their eyes to the principles of mathematics to which they are unused. The reason, therefore, that some intuitive minds are not mathematical is that they cannot at all turn their attention to the principles of mathematics. But the reason that mathematicians are not intuitive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition where the principles do not allow of such arrangement. 

...

They are scarcely seen; they are felt rather than seen; there is the greatest difficulty in making them felt by those who do not of themselves perceive them. These principles are so fine and so numerous that a very delicate and very clear sense is needed to perceive them, and to judge rightly and justly when they are perceived, without for the most part being able to demonstrate them in order as in mathematics; because the principles are not known to us in the same way, and because it would be an endless matter to undertake it. We must see the matter at once, at one glance, and not by a process of reasoning."

.- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

Sand Dunes in the Desert

"Every ripple on the ocean,
every leaf on every tree,
every sand dune in the desert,
every power we never see."

- Sting (1951 - )