“…..and this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.”
Excerpt from Wendell Berry’s poem To My Mother written in 1987 and published online by the Poetry Foundation.
“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.”
Excerpt from Jeremy Eichler’s Times Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023) ebook p. 32
“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.”
Excerpt from Daniel Lewis’ Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2024) pps. 42 – 43
“…..And so I ride (which is my metaphor)
A full-sailed ship upon an endless sea,
A universe where nothing stays the same,
Sea, sky, wind, earth and time forever changing –
Time like a river in its ceaseless motion;
On, on, each speeding hour cannot stand still,
But as waves, thrust by waves, drive waves before them,
So time runs first or follows forever new;
The flying moment gone, what once seemed never
Is now, which vanishes before we say it,
Each disappearing moment in a cycle,
Each loss replaced within the living hour.
…..Though all four are of different place and kind,
Each comes from each, and to each returns:
Loose earth becomes a fluid, and as it flows
To water, water itself will change to air,
And air to fire which rises over it
To climb the highest reaches of the heavens.
They then return, last first in backward order,
Fire in smoky air, from air to water,
And waves changed into marshes turn to earth.
Nothing retains the shape of what it was,
And Nature, always making old things new,
Proves nothing dies within the universe,
But takes another being in new forms.
What is called birth is change from what we were,
And death the shape of being left behind.
Though all things melt or grow from here to there,
Yet the same balance of the world remains.
…..And now the measure of my song is done:
The work has reached its end; the book is mine,
None shall unwrite these words: nor angry Jove,
Nor war, nor fire, nor flood,
Nor venomous time that eats our lives away.
Then let that morning come, as come it will,
When this disguise I carry shall be no more,
And all the treacherous years of life undone,
And yet my name shall rise to heavenly music,
The deathless music of the circling stars.
As long as Rome is the Eternal City
These lines shall echo from the lips of men.
As long as poetry speaks truth on earth,
That immortality is mine to wear.”
Excerpts from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses Book XV, the doctrines of Pythagoras and the Epilogue translated by Horace Gregory (New York: Viking Press, 2009) from pages 413 – 437.
“One day Old Man Coyote was bored, and so he decided to have some fun and made a basket. A big basket, round like an acorn storage basket, only much bigger and rounder…..he wove his tracks into the pattern to give a hint who’d made it. When it was finished, he put everything People would need, forever, into the basket. And then he put the basket by the trail to see what would happen.
Sure enough, along came some People, and when they saw the big basket they said ‘Hey? What’s this?’ They knew it was a basket, but they had never seen any basket this big before…..when they looked inside and saw that it had everything they needed, they said, ‘We can live in it!’ So they did.
Well. Old Man Coyote had put everything We the People would need into that basket, but he never imagined that there would someday be so many of us, and some of us would invent needs that Coyote could never imagine we needed! Pretty soon he began to hear lots of fighting and arguing in the basket. And before long some of his strongly woven strands began to tear, and the basket got holes in it, and some of the People who went in together got thrown out through the holes! Just imagine!
Well, again. Old Man Coyote wasn’t really surprised. He’s not surprised at anything, of course. Being a Trickster, he just wants to try something and see what will happen – which is why he put the big basket by the trail that day when he was bored in the first place. But…Coyote was a bit sad anyway, seeing that his gift basket had become the place for a big fight among the People. That’s why you sometimes hear him crying and singing to himself at night.” (p.178-179)
…..David Hinton, a translator of classical Chinese poetry, argues in his book China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen that Ch’an began during the Tang dynasty of ninth-century China as an intellectual and cultural rebellion. Ch’an practice was seeking to recapture the feeling and experience of immediacy and wholeness of the Paleolithic human mind and to overcome the alienation of humans from the world that resulted from the agricultural revolution and its modus operandi of humans taking control of wild nature. (p.195)
…..Shunryu Suzuki wrote in the prologue to his 1970 book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, that ‘if your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.’…..The bottom line would be that language and it’s constructs can get in the way of nondual, holistic perception and experience, of what Suzuki Roshi called beginner’s mind.” (p.196)
Excerpts from Bruce Byer’s Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere form the California Coast
…
“Thomas [Mann] paid his bill and walked towards his grandmother’s house. He could see his two sisters now, waiting for the rest of the story. Both of them in their night attire, and he could see Heinrich sitting apart from them and always in a story their mother would sigh and say that she had work to do and would continue the story tomorrow. And they would appeal to her, beg her to finish the story and she always would.
The young composer’s name was Johann Sebastian Bach, she said, and he walked to Lübeck through wind and rain and often he could find no boardinghouse and had to sleep in haystacks or in fields. Often, he was hungry. Very often he was cold. But he was always sure of his purpose. If he could get to Lübeck, he would meet the man who would help him to become a great composer.
Buxtehude was almost in despair. Some days he really believed that his sacred knowledge would be buried with him. On other days, in his heart, he knew that someone would come and he dreamed that he would recognize the man immediately and he would take him to church, and he would share his secrets with him.
‘How would he recognize the man?’ Carla asked. ‘The man would have a light in his eyes, or something special in his voice,’ her mother said.
‘How could he be sure?’ Heinrich asked.
‘Wait! He is still on the journey and worried,’ she went on.
Every day the walk seems longer. He has told the man he works for that he will be away only a short time. He does not realize how far Lübeck is. But he does not turn back. He walks on and on, asking all the time how far Lübeck is. But it is so far that some people he meets have never even heard of Lübeck and they advise him to turn back. But he is determined not to, and eventually when he reaches Lüneberg, he is told that he is not far from Lübeck. And the fame of Buxtehude has spread to there. But because of all his time on the road, poor Bach, normally so handsome, looks like a tramp. He knows that Buxtehude will never receive a man as badly dressed as he is. But he is lucky. A woman in Lüneberg, when she learns of Bach’s plight, offers to lend him the clothes. She has seen the light in him.
And so Bach arrives in Lübeck. And when he asks for Buxtehude, he is told that he will be in the Marienkirche practicing the organ. And as soon as Bach steps into the church, Buxtehude senses that he is no longer alone. He stops playing and looks down from the gallery and sees Bach and behind him he sees the light, the light Bach has carried with him all the way, something glowing in his spirit. And he knows that this is the man to whom he can tell the secret.
‘But what is the secret?’ Thomas asked.
‘If I tell you, will you promise to go to bed’
‘Yes.’
‘It is called beauty,’ his Mother said. ‘The secret is called beauty. He told him not to be afraid to put beauty in his music. And then for weeks and weeks and weeks, Buxtehude showed him how to do just that.’
‘Did Bach ever give the woman back the clothes?’ Thomas asked.
‘Yes, he did on his way home. And on their piano, he played music for her that she thought came from heaven.’ “
Excerpt from Colm Toibin’s The Magician pgs. 496-497
“What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how badly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page – for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love, which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity…”
Excerpt from a broadside by Wendell Berry produced to honor the legacy of North Point Press, 1980 – 1991.
“I think of two landscapes – one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see – not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution. If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out and in the tangible evidence you will sense a history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush – the resiliency of the twig under the bird, that precise shade of yellowish green against the milk-blue sky, the fluttering whir of the arriving sparrow, are what I mean by “the landscape.” Draw on the smell of creosote bush, or clack stones together in the dry air. Feel how light is the desiccated dropping of the kangaroo rat. Study an animal track obscured by the wind. These are the elements of the land and what makes the landscape comprehensible are the relationships between them. 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 history and a catalog of events.
The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernable, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song. That these relationships have purpose and order, however inscrutable they may seem to us, is a tenet of evolution. Similarly, the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as “mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrably subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature – the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”
Excerpt from Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative” published in the ebook Vintage Lopez (p.3 -4)
We were afraid to go back
afraid to listen to the stories
ash and bone might tell
We wanted to believe our lives were immutable
untouchable by nature, fate or disaster
At twilight we skirted the base of the first burned hill
reclaimed her scorched shoulder
her ruined slope
The ground beneath our feet released puffs of smoke
like ancient ghosts they rose up around us
to disappear into wind…..
Excerpt from the poem “After the Fires” by Devereaux Baker published in California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology edited by Molly Fisk (p.15)
“When Sir Francis Drake spent a month in 1579 repairing his ship in the bay that now bears his name, the hills and ridges to the east would have been mostly open grassland or coastal scrub because of the Miwok’s liberal use of fire as a key tool of their ecological management and because of grazing by herds of elk, which benefited from the anthropogenic burning. The same was true when Sebastian Ceremeno, a Portuguese navigator and explorer sailing on the Manilla galleon route, was shipwrecked in Drakes Bay in 1595. Richard Henry Dana, visiting San Francisco Bay in 1840 described the herds of elk he could see on the open headlands.” (p.84)
“The [Mt.] Vision Fire started on October 3, 1995, and burned for about a week in an area mostly designated as park wilderness, eventually burning almost twelve thousand acres. Some local boys apparently thought they had drowned their campfire, but they hadn’t. It’s a story that reminds me of Henry David Thoreau; on a camping trip with a friend in April 1844, their campfire got out of control and almost burned down their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Many years later, that experience led Thoreau to investigate the fire ecology of his local ecosystem. He recognized the influence of past Native American burning on the landscape and became essentially the first published fire ecologist through his writing on the subject. The Vision Fire burned an area partly dominated by bishop pine, Pinus muricata. Bishop pine became so familiar with fire that it evolved a relationship that could be called “friends with fire.” (p.86-87)
Excerpt from the chapter “Making Friends with Fire” published in Bruce Byer’s book titled Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast.
“Did you know, Dad, that if you write the word ‘red’ in green and ask a small child to tell you the color, the answer will be ‘green?’ But if you show the same word to an adult, the answer will be red. Children see the color, not the word. Adults see the word, and not the color.”
I am an advocate for wild creatures, rare plants, arrays of native vegetation, clean water, fish, stewardship of natural resources, and learning. I believe these things are compatible with ranching, sometimes lost without ranching. Some people call me a cowboy. A lot of good cowboys call me an environmentalist. I suppose there are lots of labels you can attach to me. There was a time when doing so was hurtful, so I threw back labels of my own. We throw a lot of anger at each other with words. It doesn’t do much for the land, really.
The time has come to see colors, not words.
Excerpt from the essay Colors and Words by Bob Budd in Ranching West of the 100th Meridian: Culture, Ecology, and Economics
alive in the sea of information 