#lands

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. ↗

— Ken Kesey

#moon #stars #men

Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world. ↗

— Norman Maclean

#geology #idaho #landscape #mountains #nature

Who will bear witness to these small islands and oases of wildness as land is divided and sold to become strip malls, housing developments,and parking lots? What happens to the natural history here? We must bear witness. ↗

— Joni L. James

#landscape #nature #wildness #nature

Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#landscape #nature #walking #nature

Landscapes we must owe something to the eye of the beholder. ↗

— Mary Lascelles

#nature #art

…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans ↗

— Lawrence Durrell

#science

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#discovery #eyes #having #landscapes #new

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#foreign lands #lands #only #traveler #who

To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer. ↗

— Ansel Adams

#landscapes #photography #photography

All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing ↗

— Mary Oliver

#mornings #physical-landscapes #uncertainty