Duet Between Dreamer and World

"'As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space,' Milosz writes, 'I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end!' And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
The Poetics of Space

Restless Stillness

"The universe was born restless
and has never since been still"

- Henri Rousseau (1844 - 1910)

Wonder Beyond Words

"To be alive in this beautiful,
self-organizing universe --
to participate in the dance of life
with senses to perceive it,
lungs that breathe it, organs
that draw nourishment from it --
is a wonder beyond words."

- Joanna Macy (1929 - 2025)

Note. Sadly, another "light of an enlightened eye" and an "incandescent light" has been extinguished. Eco-philosopher, systems thinker, and Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy passed away on 19 July 2025. Her 1991 monograph, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory, had a profound and lasting influence on me as physicist and photographer. Here is a wonderful interview that Macy had with Emergence magazine in 2018.

Imperturbability and Being

"... I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temper'd little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don’t, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons—or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. ('Cut this out,' as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Transmission in All Directions

"A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration - it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

Urgent, unique, uninformed about history and theory, beyond the imagination, central to a sphere without surface, its becoming is unimpeded, energetically broadcast. There is no escape from its action. It does not exist as One of a series of discrete steps, but as transmission in all directions from the field's center. It is inextricably synchronous with all other, sounds, non-sounds, which latter, received by other sets than the ear, operate in the same manner.

A sound accomplishes nothing;
without it life would not last out the instant. "

- John Cage (1912 - 1992)
Silence

The Intelligence of Water

"When you place your hand in moving water, you will feel the curves of power looping your bones, addressing your skin with logarithmic sways. Magnify that ten or twenty thousand times and you will be killed by the force. Then your body will know.... But pay attention in that moment and you will feel the intelligence of water upon you. It will tell stories of itself against your body in boils and surges and vacancies."

- Craig Childs (1967 - )
The Secret Knowledge of Water

Life's Melodies

"What is life? we ask, knowing that the answer will come not as a headline but as an aggregate. Life is dewclaws and corsages and dust mites and alligator skin and feathers and whale’s whiskers (as mammals, whales do have hair) and tree-frog serenades and foreskins and blue hydrangeas and banana slugs and war dances and cedar chips and bombardier beetles. Whenever we encounter something that is rare, we mentally add it to the seemingly endless list of forms that life can take. We smile in amazement as we discover yet another variation on an ancient theme. To hear the melody, we must hear all the notes."

- Diane Ackerman (1948 - )
The Rarest of the Rare

The Land Knows You Are There

"Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land, however, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression — its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there."

- Barry Lopez (1945 - 2020)

Arctic Dreams

Living Geometry

"We apprehend Him in the alternate voids and fullness of a cathedral; in the space that separates the salient features of a painting; in the living geometry of a flower, a seashell, an animal; in the pauses and intervals between the notes of music, in their differences of tone and sonority; and finally on the planes of conduct, in love and gentleness, the confidence and humility, which give beauty to the relationships between human beings."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Hyperion

"To be one with all—this is the life divine, this is man’s heaven. To be one with all that lives, to return in blessed self-forgetfulness into the All of Nature—this is the pinnacle of thoughts and joys, this the sacred mountain peak, the place of eternal rest, where the noonday loses its oppressive heat and the thunder its voice and the boiling sea is as the heaving field of grain."

- Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 - 1843)
Hyperion