Japanese ceramics from the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Robin L. Chandler 2026
“If we refuse to see what is coming, expedited by our unwillingness to make the necessary changes to not just survive, but flourish, then we are the creators of our own demise. Change is upon us and change is within us. Whatever future may be collapsing before our eyes, we can dream a new world into being. We can protect what is vulnerable and restore and rebuild what remains with love for those who will follow us.” p. 306
Japanese ceramics from the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Robin L. Chandler, 2026
“Why does ‘the land’ have to give something back to the writer? Why do we need to imagine, manufacture, or ‘experience’ some kind of bridge between self and ‘wild’ to give purpose to writing the land?” p.vii
“As globalization draws us together and industrialization and human population pressures take their toll on natural habitats, as species of plants and animals flicker and are snuffed from the earth, it may be worthwhile to ask whether an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources and sets into motion dire consequences.” p.1
“There are, of course, long traditions of the pastoral, poetry centered on nature or landscape, in both Eastern and Western language literature. I, myself, am less interested in ‘nature poetry’ – where nature features as theme – than in poetry that investigates – both thematically and formally – the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception.” p.2
“Poetry doesn’t simply supplement the rational intellect but provides inherent and sometimes incommensurable forms of insight. Because its meanings are neither quantitative nor verifiable, poetry may offer different, subtler, and more complex expressions than the language of information and commerce. An ecological poetry might even…” p.3
Cover of the book Winter Reyes: Poems and Paintings by Robin L. Chandler
The vernal equinox arrived and brought a blast of summer in typically springtime March. But I’m holding on to the memories of rain and wind, cold nights, frosty mornings, and blue winter light. And luckily, I can easily reconnect by opening a book that captures the feeling of winter in painting and poetry.
Inspired by my midwinter hikes, Winter Reyes rejoices in the hibernal beauty of Point Reyes National Seashore and shares the hope I find in nature’s resilience. My paintings and poems commemorate this jewel of the National Park Service. Copies of the book can be purchased on my website. I hope you have as much pleasure reading as I had in the making.
“reaching the bridge, the water parts, brush arches to the block page
Wet on wet, the work begins, the atmosphere emerges
Sketch of holiday cheer in Point Reyes Station. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.
“In 1935, the National Park Service recommended an 83-square mile park, but there was no action until 1958. By this time, subdivisions were again being planned, logging was underway at Inverness Ridge, and the state was planning a freeway that would replace Highway 1 and open the area to suburban development. One lobbyist told a Congressional committee that by the year 2000
‘there will no longer be a Marin County. There will be a greater San Francisco..…the section we have under discussion today, gentlemen, will be as intensely built over as Palo Alto, or Burlingame or San Mateo.’
The MCL [Marin Conservation League] worked with Marin’s representative in Congress Clem Miller, who introduced and tirelessly promoted his Point Reyes National Seashore bill in the House, while California’s US Senator Clair Engle, pushed it through in the Senate…..In a compromise with ranchers, the park bill allowed cattle and dairy ranching to continue for 25 years in a 27-square mile “pastoral zone,” while livestock grazing elsewhere would be phased out. Congress passed the bill, and President Kennedy signed it on September 13, 1962. The park was authorized to include 83 square miles, just as the Park Service had originally recommended…..”
“Mass extinctions are extremely rare and catastrophic events, but the human-driven one is seldom deemed newsworthy by the dominant media. This is not an incidental oversight: the destruction of life’s diversity must remain invisible or obscure in the public domain, because it is fully entangled with the freedoms that people (are goaded to) value and seek.”
Glenbrook Trail, Point Reyes National Seashore. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.
“So while this is a book about the music of memory, it also necessarily becomes a book about the memory of music and the deeper social memory of art – its ability to recall the catastrophes of war but also the optimistic promise and gleam of earlier eras, or what the critic Walter Benjamin called, with touching simplicity, “hope in the past.” This book in fact draws inspiration from Benjamin’s vision of the true purpose of history: to sort through the rubble of earlier eras in order to recover these buried shards of unrealized hope, to reclaim them, to redeem them. They are, as he saw it, nothing more or less than the moral and spiritual building blocks of an alternate future.”
Long-billed Curlews at Limantour Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore in Winter. Robin L. Chandler, 2025
“Thomas Berry was a US cultural historian who introduced the broader legal concept of Earth jurisprudence early in the twenty-first century. Earth jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and human governance that says humans are just one element in a wider community of beings, and that the welfare of one speaks to the welfare of all. “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, “ Berry argued, and it’s through the work of people such as Stone, Berry, Kimmerer, Kolbert, and others that we are moving our collective understanding, and our will, toward a more environmentally just world. In the face of the ecological catastrophes beating down on us, we must remember the collective good of countless people as well as the rights of trees, and of the land that supports and nurtures us all.”
