This is very lovely and how perfect to bring the masterful wordsmith Wendell Berry into this. I’m sure you’ve also read Henry Beston’s Outermost House, which I’m currently discovering. There’s a passage at the beginning where he writes “the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed me I could not let go. The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”
How beautiful it is to read such things and be transported for a moment to someone else’s experiences. Thank you for sharing your beautiful words in the way that you do and extending these connections.
You might also like this article in The Guardian -
“Once a year I lose myself in the Hebrides to walk and think – before going back to the life I love
Only recently did I realise how the Hebrides work on me. Their secret is simple. The landscape is a time machine. I am walking in the ancient world and the world that is yet to come. Nothing that I think or feel has been nullified or even changed by being here. Rather, it is that my capacity to acknowledge – to encompass – seems somehow to have been widened or deepened. As if, by entering the time machine, my perspective is momentarily stretched to millions of years. So that, even when it snaps back and contracts, it does not shrink quite as tight and constraining as it was before.”
Not to be overly dramatic, but as the tumblrinas would say: *screaming, crying, throwing up* over this. Your work is a gift, this essay felt like a blessing. I was immediately reminded of Campbell's: "People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. "
I also want to [...] say, each morning upon waking: I am here, I am staying, and I am paying attention in the light.
This is very lovely and how perfect to bring the masterful wordsmith Wendell Berry into this. I’m sure you’ve also read Henry Beston’s Outermost House, which I’m currently discovering. There’s a passage at the beginning where he writes “the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed me I could not let go. The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”
How beautiful it is to read such things and be transported for a moment to someone else’s experiences. Thank you for sharing your beautiful words in the way that you do and extending these connections.
Thank you for this! Love that passage from Beston; I'll have to add Outermost House to my to read pile!
You might also like this article in The Guardian -
“Once a year I lose myself in the Hebrides to walk and think – before going back to the life I love
Only recently did I realise how the Hebrides work on me. Their secret is simple. The landscape is a time machine. I am walking in the ancient world and the world that is yet to come. Nothing that I think or feel has been nullified or even changed by being here. Rather, it is that my capacity to acknowledge – to encompass – seems somehow to have been widened or deepened. As if, by entering the time machine, my perspective is momentarily stretched to millions of years. So that, even when it snaps back and contracts, it does not shrink quite as tight and constraining as it was before.”
Full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/oct/02/western-isles-scotland-walk-think-back-to-the-life-i-love-edward-docx
Not to be overly dramatic, but as the tumblrinas would say: *screaming, crying, throwing up* over this. Your work is a gift, this essay felt like a blessing. I was immediately reminded of Campbell's: "People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. "
I also want to [...] say, each morning upon waking: I am here, I am staying, and I am paying attention in the light.
Thank you for this, and for those words from Campbell. The rapture of being alive! Yes, a thousand times yes. All the light.