2/12/2012

To write about nature in America is to take up the challenge of Emerson and Thoreau -- to measure your experiences against their own, and then to see if you have anything left to say.

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As it is, we canot walk through the woods without making a sound.  Except for the crows, I am the loudest thing in the winter woods, the thing least equipped for survival.

To be in touch with nature is, necessarily, to be in touch with death.  The only way to be fully in nature is to be nothing in it.  A productive walk in the woods means, necessarily, to imagine your own not being.

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In a thatchwork of pines, the vertebrae and two legs of a deer, the ribs stripped clean by scavengers, on one leg a perfectly preserved hoof and foreleg, the fur still bristling, as though that part of the creature did not yet know what the rest of the creature seemed to know.

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A shift in the tenor of the day at about three o'clock -- clouds, wind, the silence of the woods broken, birds suddenly active where there were none, the light weakened, the sky overcast, the temperature dropping from the mid-30s to somewhere below freezing.

When it comes, the Landscape listens --
Shadows --hold their breath --

(Emily Dickinson)