Holdfast Quotes

“I have sought out storms all my life, without thinking much about why. Long before we knew better, my sisters and I played with lightning on the crest of the Rocky Mountains, reaching our hands towards rocks. The closer we came, the more furiously the rocks buzzed with electricity. We skipped and spun mindlessly in the electric charges, creating music with our bodies…what reed in the human spirit vibrates with the violence of storms?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“In the green, light-shot sea along the Oregon coast, bullwhip kelp lean toward land on the incoming tides and swirl seaward as the water falls away, never letting go of their grip on the ocean floor. What keeps each plant in places is a holdfast, a fist of knobby fingers that stick to rock with a glue the plant makes from sunshine and salt water, an invisible bond strong enough to hold against all but the worst winter gales. The holdfast is a structure biologists don’t entirely understand. Philosophers have not even begun to try. I resolve to study holdfasts. What will be cling to, in the confusion of the tides? What structures of connection will hold us in place? How will we find an attachment to the natural world that makes us feel safe and fully alive, here, at the edge of water?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“In forests or huckleberry patches, I’ll be hiking along under the hemlocks and suddenly the light will stream in sideways and every leaf lights up and I’m stopped in midstride, overwhelmed with how beautiful the forest has become…sometimes the natural world gives you a gift so beautiful, so precious, that all you can do is stand there and cry. But I never actually though of this as religion. All the same, the thought is an interesting one, and now I’m trying to look around me a little differently, keep an open mind.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“Storms are our wilderness. A few generations ago, people looked to wild lands for the experience of the sublime…But now we tidy up the wild places and manage the mountains for science pleasure…the same landscape is merely beautiful now…if people are looking for wilderness now, all they need to do is turn their faces to the sky. Philosophers…use the phrase “that greater than which nothing can be conceived.” Our ancestors spoke to storms with magical words, prayed to them… dancing to the very edge of what is alien and powerful… we may have lost the dances, but we carry with us a need to approach the power of the universe…”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“The thrill of the storm…doesn’t purr, it crackles. I asked Frank if the excitement could be physical. He studies chemicals in the brain, so he might know. Maybe it’s’ the sudden drop in air pressure, I suggested. Released from the weight of the atmosphere, all your cells expand and life and your spirits lighten. You have to breathe harder to get enough oxygen, and nothing seems quite fastened down…

All the elements of beauty can be found in the way light strikes a wheat field under purple thunderheads; clarity and lucidity, a kind of shine and smoothness, unity and diversity…

The opposite of beauty is not ugliness. The opposite of beauty is sublimity, the blow-to-the-gut awareness of chaotic forces unleashed and uncontrolled, the terror- and finally the awe. To experience the sublime is to understand, with an insight so fierce and sudden it makes you flinch, that there is power and possibility in the universe greater than anyone can imagine. The sublime blows out the boundaries of human experience.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“You can’t take the planet for granted; it could all be otherwise. There must be worlds spinning on the far side of Jupiter where field guides are futile, where nothing is this or that, but rather nothing at all or everything at once. Imagine a simple world where everything is one kind of thing, evenly distributed, like red cinders blown out of a red cinder cone onto an even plain, so when the wind blows, it plays a single endless note. Imagine a planet where no two things are ever the same and there are infinitely many things…or imagine a world where chaos never yielded to creation, a world forever unsorted, spinning in that glare that is all light combined. These are worlds that rationality can’t conquer.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“We realized too late that we never taught our students what ducks know without knowing, that “we must love life before loving its meaning,” as Dostoyevsky told us. We must love life, and some meaning may grow from that love…What is it all for, this magnifying-glass-in-the-sun focus on being, this marshland, this wetness, this stewpot, this great splashing…the colors, the plumage, the effort, the noise, the complexity? Nothing, I think, except to continue. This is the testimony of the marsh: Life directs all its power to one end, and that is to continue to be. A marsh at nightfall is life loving itself. Nothing more. But nothing less, either, and we should not be fooled in to thinking this is a small thing.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“Try to go infinitely deep into any piece of the distance of time. If there is eternal life, a friend says, it will not be in the length of your life, but in its depth…I don’t think there is any limit to the depth of each moment, and I am going to try to live in a way that plumbs those depths, to live thickly, expanding the reach of my moment down into the mire of detail and up into the damp and cry-filled air.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World