EXTRAVAGANT GESTURES: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ANNIE DILLARD

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.  After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.  The whole show has been on fire from the word go.  I come down to the water to cool my eyes.  But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

What do I make of all this texture?  What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down?  The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is a possibility of beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.  We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here.  Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, of it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.  It is that simple.  What you see is what you get.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery . . .

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

SOMETHING OF THE MARVELOUS

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

Aristotle

Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth
find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carlson

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands
through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

Aldo Leopold

I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery,
feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it
 and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is perfect and why.

Jane Goodall

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man
if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature
and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

E.B. White

Our task must be to free ourselves . . .
by widening our circle of compassion to embrace
all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Einstein

Happiness,
not in another place, but this place . . .
not for another hour, but this hour.

Walt Whitman

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Keats

NOTES FROM A DELINQUENT BLOGGER

Ruby Throated Hummingbird (Female)

I'm rather shocked to see that my last posting on this blog was May 26th, almost three months ago.  My absence during this period was not planned.  I've simply been spending almost every summer hour in the great outdoors, far away from my digital devices.  There is one exception, however.  I have taken my camera with me every day, whether out for long walks or exploratory drives through the countryside. For whatever reason, my orientation this summer has been more visual than verbal, and the natural world has drawn me deeper and deeper into both its beauty and its mysteries.

That said, I will simply let some of my summer photographs speak to where I've been and what I've been doing for the past few months.  

Silhouette of Blue Dasher Dragonfly

Fixated on Distant Light

Spicebush Swallowtail

on Lantana Bush

Barred Owl, Heard Nightly 

and Finally Sighted in my Front Yard

Lily Pads After Rain in a Pond

at Bellingrath Gardens, Near Mobile, Alabama

Other Lily Pads in Same Pond,

Tweaked to Portray My Sense of How

Van Gogh Might Have Painted the Scene

Ruby Throated Hummingbird (Female)

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Blue Dasher Dragonfly

Wary Male Cardinal

From the Lily Pond at Bellingrath Gardens

Spicebush Swallowtail

Ruby Throated Hummingbird (Female)

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest.  It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

David Attenborough 

MEDITATIONS ON NATURE (II): THOREAU

Black-Crowned Night Heron

I love nature partly because  she is not man, but a retreat from him.  None of his institutions control or pervade her.  There a different kind of right prevails.  In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness.  If this world was all man I could not stretch myself—I should lose all hope.  He is constraint; she is freedom to me.  He makes me wish for another world; she makes me content with this.

Thoreau's Journal (January 3, 1853)

Great White Egret

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

Thoreau, Walden

Great Blue Heron

We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day.  We must take root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day.  I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind.

Thoreau, Journal (December 29, 1856) 

White Ibis

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomenon to the preservation of moral & and intellectual health.

Thoreau's Journal (May 6, 1851)

Black-Crowned Night Heron (Immature)

We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where bittern and meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.

Thoreau, Walden

Brown Pelican

For my part, I feel, that with regard to Nature, I live a sort of border life, on the confines of the world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.  Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will o' the wisp through the bogs and sloughs unimaginable.

Thoreau, "Walking" in Excursions 

Snowy Egret

I have a room all to myself; it is Nature.

Thoreau's Journal (January 3, 1853)

Black-Crowned Night Heron

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow I have clutched.

Thoreau, Walden