Sublime

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes.

With that great countercultural courage of defying cynicism, Eiseley insists that it was the humans who nourished the highest in their nature by means of love, who lived with such exquisite tenderness for life in all of its expressions, that propelled our species from the caves to the cathedrals, from savagery to sonnets.

It is a law of physics that all matter is conserved—our bodies return, return, return. This is the message of ecologists, and of mystics—that each life is radically connected to all of life, always, with nothing so small that it can be lost.

While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.

Die Ordnung der übrigen belebten Welt war unabdingbar, um die eigene zu verstehen. Die Felsbilder zeichnen eine symbolische Ökologie – und diese Ökologie war es, die den Menschen über Jahrhunderttausende in der restlichen Schöpfung verankerte.

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can’t stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt.

But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.