“It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It’s no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment.” Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

"Pay attention. Be honest. Tell about it."  Mary Oliver

 “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war...And he does at his best what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and with that revelation to make freedom real.” James Baldwin from a 1962 essay "The Creative Process"

"When we commit to action, the universe comes to meet us in unforeseen and providential ways as though it holds the extra firestick needed to ignite the fire. It only does this once the leap into the unknown has been taken." Lucy Neal in Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Howard Thurman

 "The civilizing process sought to do away with two attributes that today are the cause of the terminal crisis being suffered: by the negation of the spirit and the destruction of nature. Both phenomena lie at the bottom of the malaise of modernity.
Sooner or later, every human being faces the challenge of recognizing their own spirit. Spirituality does not appear, except as a result of their confronting, not fleeing from, the world. It is the response of being ‘in front of the abyss’. Faced with the lack of logic or meaning of existence, faced with the incommensurability of the universe."
Victor M. Toledo in Resilience, 9/2020

"If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go.

You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awk-ward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn."

Bayo Akomolafe

 “...stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path.”

Robert Macfarlane in Ghostways

"I made myself pay attention to places where I thought nothing was going on... then after a while, the landscape materialized in a fuller way. Its expression was deeper and broader than I had first imagined  at first glance." Barry Lopez

 “My originality consists in ... the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” Odilon Redon

 "A man must dream a long time in order to act in grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness."
Jean Genet

 "The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.
The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek." Parker Palmer

"And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into hummus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as is ink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed inter reaching of the treetops, the leaves falling - and then that, too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace."
From Wendell Berry’S 1968 essay entitled “A Native Hill”

"... the thing I love best in literature. It takes a personal question (or a moment of doubt could be another way of thinking about it) and interrogates lines of inquiry surrounding that question, historically and psychologically. After a while the answer is known but it no longer matters because the expanding life of the question is what keeps us reading. This is the kind of book that demands I slow down the closer I get to its end, preparing myself for the loss of the speaker in my world." Claudia Rankine

“The songs of the guardians of silence

are the most powerful.” Joy Harjo 

“I had been looking at the world as if it were cracks in a pavement. But it’s not about the individual cracks, it’s about the patterns and the networks...” Jonathan Ledgard

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of poetry twice." Robert Frank

“I think the chanciest thing is to put spirituality in art,...Because people don’t understand it. Writers don’t know what to do with it. They’re scared of it, so they ignore it. But if there’s going to be any universal consciousness-raising, you have to deal with it, even though people will ridicule you.” Betye Saar

“…when it comes to the sacred — which is what she’s really talking about — the line between freakish and sublime is slight in every culture.” Holland Cotter in review of Mrinalini Mukherjee work

"Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of dormant schizophrenia, but of careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an incumbrance."
from The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard