Muir was a quintessential romantic frontier figure. Unarmed, carrying only a few crusts of bread, a tin cup a small portion of tea, a notebook, and a few scientific instruments, Muir walked into the vastness of the Sierras to search out truths. Single- minded, he did not hesitate to challenge the accepted the accepted authorities and their explanations regarding the wilderness he loved. He formulated his own theories and carefully searched out the evidence. America has always loved its rebels, even if it turns out later that they have not discovered the whole truth.
Tag: nature
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But I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth must acquire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness, — as if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.
– Henry Thoreau
I didn’t realize how poetic Thoreau’s prose was. That’s why one must read, must discover, these works for yourself.
Experience them on your own.
Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. p. 282
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The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow.
Henry D. ThoreauNature doesn’t pause. This is something we inherently know, but it takes a keen observer like Thoreau to call our attention to it.
Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. pp28
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Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a dull leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day, while the western landscape is and spectral still, and clothed in a sombre Tartarrean light, like the shadowy realms.
– Henry D. ThoreauThat from Thoreau’s essay, a Winter Walk. The Tartarrean light refers to Tartarus, the lowest section of the underworld in Greek mythology.
Thoreau opens by opening his door and describing winter morning to us. Morning is a transition of light. Thoreau mentions light, in some form, three times in two sentences.
“Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle“
“A lurid brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day“
“clothed in a sombre Tartarrean light“
Read A Winter Walk in full here.
Or pick up this helpful version Henry D. Thoreau Essays, full annotated edition from Yale press.
Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. pp28
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Glory be to God for dappled things - For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
Keeping with the thankfulness theme. This time from Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The two lines that hang in my mind are:
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings
and
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
The first is a picture of fall changing into winter. Chestnuts and finches wings, the colors of both depict fall. While the firecoal indicates that the temperature is dropping.
The second is, and I don’t think it’s what Hopkins intended, but I picture a tackle box and fishing gear sitting on the floor of a boat.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets). United Kingdom, Everyman, 1995. pp15
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Occasionally I speculate what sort of chap he can be who takes ten winters out of whatever work he does simply for the purpose of watching peregrines. One must inevitably feel curious about anyone possessed and driven by such a monomania. I experienced a kind of awe, an astonishment, and a real excitement … No bird has ever had such a Boswell.
John MooreFor everyone out their observing and cataloging things for no apparent reason.
Keep going.
Saunders, Hetty. My House of Sky: The life and work of J.A. Baker. Lower Dairy, Toller Fratrum, Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2017. pp113
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As a child I loved the autumn. Leaves fell from a large chestnut tree and gathered into drifts in the garden. I raked them into a pile and tended it carefully, adding fresh armfuls as the weeks went by. Before long, the piles grew large enough to fill several bathtubs. Again and again, I’d leap into the leaves from the low branches of the tree. Once inside, I’d wriggle until I was entirely submerged and lie buried in the rustle, lost in the curious smells.
– My leaf piles were both places to hide and worlds to explore. But as months went by, the piles shrank. It became harder to submerge myself. I investigated, reaching down into the deepest regions of the the heap, pulling out damp handfuls of what looked less and less like leaves, and more and more like soil. Worms started to appear. Were they carrying the soil up into the pile, or the leaves down into the soil? I was never sure. My sense was that the pile of leaves was sinking, but if it was sinking, what was it sinking into? How deep was the soil? What kept the world afloat on this solid sea?
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. pgs 223, 224We’ll let biologist Merlin Sheldrake usher us into autumn.
His book Entangled Life deserves its plaudits.
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Bird songs ring. Listen.
Lark? Jay? Raven? Warbler?
I have no idea.
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Sometimes the grass is
greener. Building four’s oak rocks
a tailored moss suit.
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How do you grow? Your
blossoms blossom from above,
your roots claw below.
Floodlights and Goalposts 