The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Barry López

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it–like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.

landscape, nature, understanding

It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one’s time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay — a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory.

memory, personal-essay, story

Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.

beauty-in-nature, meditation, nature, practice, spirit, thought

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I’ve conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room.

books, breathing, meditation, nature, reading, writing

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.

beauty, enlightenment, landscape, learning, meditation, travel

Imagine a forty-five-year-old male fifty feet long, a slim, shiny black animal cutting the surface of green ocean water at twenty knots. At fifty tons it is the largest carnivore on earth. Imagine a four-hundred-pound heart the size of a chest of drawers driving five gallons of blood at a stroke through its aorta; a meal of forty salmon moving slowly down twelve-hundred feet of intestine…the sperm whale’s brain is larger than the brain of any other creature that ever lived…With skin as sensitive as the inside of your wrist.

animals, evolution, life-perspective, nature, ocean, whale, wonder

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it–like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.

landscape, nature, understanding