Quote From an Oglala Lakota Chief ~ We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness,” and only to him was it “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery…
Art & Fear: David Bayles & Ted Orland ~ …While a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art…
The Sense of Wonder: Rachel Carson ~ A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had the influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last through life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later yers, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength…
“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose…” ~ Dolly Parton
Art & Fear: David Bayles & Ted Orland ~ We learn at a young age the perils of being perceived as different. We learn that others have the power to single out, to ridicule, to turn away from and to “mark” the one who is different….As an artist, you learn these lessons all over again – With a vengeance. In following the path of your heart, the chances are that your work will not be understandable to others – this is not good. After all, wanting to be understood is a basic need – an affirmation of the humanity you share with everyone around you…
ARCTIC DREAMS: Imagination and Desire In a Northern Landscape
©Barry Lopez – Vintage Books; 2001, pg. 228
“Whenever we seek to take swift and efficient possession of places completely new to us, places we neither own nor understand, our first and often only assessment is a scientific one. And so our evaluations remain unfinished.
Whatever evaluations we finally make of a stretch of land, however, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle tan we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression – its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there…”
ARCTIC DREAMS: Imagination and Desire In a Northern Landscape
©Barry Lopez – Vintage Books; 2001
Chapter Seven: The Country of the Mind. (Pages 273-74)
“A Lakota woman named Elaine Jahner once wrote that what lies at the heart of the religion of hunting peoples is the notion that a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. To put it another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different.
In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound. The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.”
Quotes ‘n Quotes…
In the vast backwaters of the mind, that place of twilight and mystery, are images that warm the heart and feed the soul, and at times stir and unsettle. It is a place where creativity is born, where the heart nurtures our deepest-held desire, and where courage stokes its inmost fires…
~ GHN
CROSSING OPEN GROUND © Barry Lopez Vintage Books; 1989
Landscape and Narrative: (Page 67)
“Among the Navajo and, as far as I know, many other native peoples, the land is thought to exhibit a sacred order. That order is the basis of ritual. The rituals themselves reveal the power in that order. Art, architecture, vocabulary, and costume, as well as ritual, are derived from the perceived natural order of the universe – from observations and meditations on the exterior landscape. An indigenous philosophy – metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and logic – may also be derived from a people’s continuous attentiveness to both the obvious (scientific) and the ineffable (artistic) orders of the local landscape. Each individual, further, undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.
I think of the Navajo for a specific reason. Among the various sung ceremonies of this people – Enemyway, Coyoteway, Red Antway, Uglyway – is one called Beautyway. In the Navajo view, the elements of one’s interior life – one’s psychological makeup and moral bearing – are subject to a persistent principle of disarray. Beautyway is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time….The purpose of this invocation is to recreate in the individual who is the subject of the Beautyway ceremony that same order, to make the individual again a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape.
I believe a story* functions in a similar way. A story draws on relationships in the exterior landscape and projects them onto the interior landscape. The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes, to use all the elements of story – syntax, mood, figures of speech – in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual’s interior. Inherent in story is the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call “the land…”
* To the photographer a photograph represents a “story” caught in a moment of time…
Art & Fear: David Bayles & Ted Orland ~ “Where the scientist asks what equation would best describe the trajectory of an airborne rock, the artist asks what it would feel like to throw one…”
Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. ~ Robert Brault
“I cannot respect any man who knows only one way to spell a word…” ~ Anon.
“He respects owl, because you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right.” ~ A.A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh
“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.” ~ A.A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”
ARCTIC DREAMS: Imagination and Desire In a Northern Landscape © Barry Lopez Bantam Books; March 1987
The Country of the Mind: (Page 250)
“…a culture’s most cherished places are not necessarily visible to the eye – spots on the land one can point to. They are made visible in drama – in narrative, song, and performance. It is precisely what is invisible in the land, however, that makes what is merely empty space to one person a place to another. The feeling that a particular place is suffused with memories, the specific focus of sacred and profane stories, and that the whole landscape is a congeries of such places, is what is meant by a local sense of the land. The observation that it is merely space which requires definition before it has meaning – political demarcation, an assignment of its ownership, or industrial development – betrays a colonial sensibility.
It is easy to underestimate the power of a long-term association with the land, not just with a specific spot but with the span of it in memory and imagination, how it fills, for example, one’s dreams. For some people, what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land. If the land is summarily disfigured or reorganized, it causes them psychological pain. Again, such people are attached to the land as if by luminous fibers; and they live in a kind of time that is not of the moment but, in concert with memory, extensive, measured by a lifetime. To cut these fibers causes not only pain but a sense of dislocation.”
“The moment where you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever being able to do it.” ~ J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan.
“Pooh, promise me you won’t forget me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.” Pooh thought for a little. “How old shall I be then?” “Ninety-nine.” Pooh nodded, “I promise.” ~ A.A. Milne
Twilight is a time of the inner, of reflection, the stirring of ancient memory traces – for the young it is a time of wonderment and intrigue, but for elders in the midst, it is all that, as well as recollection, bittersweet and nostalgic and beautiful… ~ GHN
“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ~ Roald Dahl, The Minpins.
“The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge (of the Grand Canyon) the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first…” ~ Barry Lopez: Crossing Open Ground: Gone Back into the Earth…
A child’s simple question, Why?, is one of the most difficult and profound of queries – treasure it as the precious gem that it is… ~GHN
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had the influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alientation from the sources of our strength…” ~ Rachel Carson: The Sense of Wonder…
“The heart alone knows what the substance of love is – the eye of reason has no power to behold it…” ~ Muslim Proverb
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“In the crucible of the family were we forged – In life’s challenges we see what we are made of…” ~ GHN
ARCTIC DREAMS: Imagination and Desire In a Northern Landscape © Barry Lopez Bantam Books; March 1987
Preface: (Pages XXV-XXVI)
“The individual’s dream, whether it be so private a wish as that the joyful determination of nesting arctic birds might infuse a distant friend weary of life, or a magnanimous wish, that a piece of scientific information wrested from the landscape might serve one’s community – in individual dreams is the hope that one’s own life will not have been lived for nothing. The very much larger dream, that of a specific people, is a story we have been carrying with us for millennia. It is a narrative of determination and hope that follows a question: What will we do as the wisdom of our past bears down on our future? It is a story of ageless conversation, not only conversation among ourselves about what we mean and wish to do, but a conversation held with the land – our contemplation and wonder at a prairie thunderstorm, or before the jagged line of a young mountain, or at the sudden rise of ducks from an isolated lake. We have been telling ourselves the story of what we represent in the land for 40,000 years. At the heart of this story, I think, is a simple, abiding belief: it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.”
“If a statement is untrue, it is not the more respectable because it has been said in Latin.”
~ A.A. Milne, Not That It Matters
“Let your heart guide you. It whispers so listen closely…” ~ GHN
“Once in a while right in the middle of an ordinary life love gives us a fairy tale…” ~ GHN
ARCTIC DREAMS: Imagination and Desire In a Northern Landscape © Barry Lopez Vintage Books; 2001
Chapter Nine: A Northern Passage. (Pages 404-405)
“For a relationship with landscape to be lasting, it must be reciprocal. At the level at which the land supplies our food, this is not difficult to comprehend, and the mutuality is often recalled in a grace at meals. At the level at which landscape seems beautiful or frightening to us and leaves us affected, or at the level at which it furnishes us with the metaphors and symbols with which we pry into mystery, the nature of reciprocity is harder to define. In approaching the land with an attitude of obligation, willing to observe courtesies difficult to articulate – perhaps only a gesture of the hands – one establishes a regard from which dignity can emerge. From that dignified relationship with the land, it is possible to imagine an extension of dignified relationships throughout one’s life. Each relationship is formed of the same integrity, which initially makes the mind say: the things in the land fit together perfectly, even though they are always changing. I wish the order of my life to be arranged in the same way I find the light, the slight movement of the wind, the voice of a bird, the heading of a seed pod I see before me. This impeccable and indisputable integrity I want in myself.
One of the oldest dreams of mankind is to find a dignity that might include all living things. And one of the greatest human longings must be to bring such dignity to one’s own dreams, for each to find his or her own life exemplary in some way. The struggle to do this is a struggle because an adult sensibility must find some way to include all the dark threads of life. A way to do this is to pay attention to what occurs in a land not touched by human schemes, where an original order prevails.
The dignity we seek is one beyond that articulated by Enlightenment philosophers. A more radical Enlightenment is necessary, in which dignity is understood as an innate quality, not as something tendered by someone outside. And that common dignity must include the land and its plants and creatures. Otherwise it is only an invention, and not, as it should be, a perception about the nature of living matter…”
“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?” ~ A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
“Love is like swallowing hot chocolate before it has cooled off. It takes you by surprise at first, but keeps you warm for some time.” ~ Anon.
Journeys of a Bent Mind 