my delicious loose ends
Soul & Soil
“Soul and soil are not separate. Neither are wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love; our love will be our undoing, as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.”
Carried by the Wind
“And yet I raise my hands aloft to God, that I might be held by God, just like a feather which has no weight from its own strength and lets itself be carried by the wind.”
—Hildegard of Bingen, The Book of Divine Works
Fire and Water
“At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, ‘Come down to the water.’ It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Beauty
“Beauty is not accidental, frivolous, or marginal, but at the very center, stirring our hearts and our sensitive, sensuous bodies, attracting us into life with its immediacy and delight.”
—J. Ruth Gendler, Notes on the Need for Beauty
Impressions
“Every rain cloud, however fleeting, leaves its mark, not only on trees and flowers whose pulses are quickened and on the replenished streams and lakes, but also on the rocks are its marks engraved whether we can see them or not.”
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
