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A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. As far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape, and so they roam with confidence. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of
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saying that justice is helping each other on the journey.
Plants and animals are also a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves.
The most beautiful thing in the abandoned hospital was the peeling paint. The place had been painted again and again in pastels, and in the years of its abandonment these layers flaked into lozenges and curled scrolls, a different color on each side. The flakes clung to the walls like papery bark and piled up like fallen leaves.
Vacant lots like missing teeth gave a rough grin to the streets we haunted.
A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn’t.
It was as though the whole world consisted of the tiny close-up realm of these creatures and the vast distances of heaven,
Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown.
this too is a reminder that maps cannot be commensurate with their subject, that even a map accurate down to blades of grass would fall out of accuracy as soon as the grass was grazed or trampled. The Great Salt Lake cannot be mapped with any degree of accuracy, because it lies in a shallow basin without drainage: any slight change in water level becomes an extensive change in shoreline.
Thus the map of languages spoken and the map of soil types canvas the same area differently, just as Freudianism and shamanism describe the same psyche differently. No representation is complete.
Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t—and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface.
My place had been made out of plants and landforms and light and some human histories. His was crowded with creatures going about their lives, each living according to a pattern, the patterns interwoven into a tapestry of formidable complexity.
