You Are Here Quotes

“these mountains have given us so much & we will not even give ourselves to each other”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Nature cannot be redeemed. It is your wish to redeem it, to set things right. It is the impossibility of redemption. It is the lover walking out, their self-justified gait as they disappear through the tunnel of flowers.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“If in order to have one tree flourish, we must plant more around it, the same must go for poems.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Why am I still thinking about that woman? Do I also prefer outrage to action? Is it as simple as anger being easier than grief? And oh my God, are you as exhausted as I am from grieving the planet?”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Why was I polite when the world is on fire?”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“and obviously you can’t grab someone by the shoulders on an airplane and scream YOU ARE WHY THE WORLD IS ON FIRE, which is good, I support that, I should not have done that, but that’s where my mind keeps going, to an alternate reality where I did lose my cool, and I did call her names, and I did make a scene, and remind me again, why can’t I?”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Resistance is struggle against impossible circumstance, refusal, the will to survive in the face of annihilation; it can also be the surviving remnant enacting revenge.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“The otter was shredding, caught a couple of nice waves, said a sixteen-year-old dude whose board was commandeered by the otter at Cowell’s Beach.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“They will never burn you, no— though no one will ever put them out.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“My grandfather smoked Winstons and what could be more American than choosing one’s future decline.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“What do you mean the wind is not alive? Look at the way it courts the shy juniper. Can’t you see its reliable visits every afternoon? Its secure attachment style to its own wet and thunderous passions?”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“And oh my God, are you as exhausted as I am from grieving the planet? Tell me what I’m supposed to say about the end of the world. Tell me how not to be hysterical every time I see what’s coming. Every time I see what’s here. Tell me how to accept that it didn’t have to be this way but that it is. Tell me how to accept this sun, this fire, this sky, this day. Don’t leave me here in these ashes. Tell me to go inside. Tell me not to stare at the sun. Tell me it’s OK to be alone. Tell me it’s OK to be scared. Tell me it’s OK to be grief stricken. Tell me not to give up. Tell me to stop thinking about that woman. Tell me there are things I can’t change. Tell me I have to live.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“I respect the patience of heartbreak how it waits through the sweetness through the familiar beauty & then reveals itself through what doesn’t return or never arrives at all & it is only you & a series of blinking memories the moments you had once & believed yourself able to touch again I think another word for this is hunger”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are. ADA LIMÓN, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Do I also prefer outrage to action? Is it as simple as anger being easier than grief? And oh my God, are you as exhausted as I am from grieving the planet? Tell me what I’m supposed to say about the end of the world.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“My grandfather there and muscadines in the Georgia heat. My grandfather smoked Winstons and what could be more American than choosing one’s future decline.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Some people call a hackberry a junk tree or trash tree, throwing shade. I love the tree’s shade, and now it will be gone, as well as the sunlight in the shape of love, and the evil spirits will do as they please with our nights.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“People who romanticize an Africa They’ve never seen Like to identify themselves With lions. It’s all roar and hunt, Quick fucks and blond manes.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Love and dread are brethren said a mystic woman in the Middle Ages.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“my relationship with (love) (nature) (money) (fill in the blank) is like my relationship to weather— i only see it when it’s pouring on my head. i’m sorry to the trees i grew up with.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“I wonder what’s past resistance to change, on the other side of fear. If I don’t look down, or walk away. Step over the snake instead, realize both living and dying require giving up.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“In the forest, grief lives a new life as devotion. Early August leaves play at color before surrendering to both man-made ground and messy slopes”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“You might not know this, but poems are like trees in this way. They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Watching them makes me feel at once more human and less human. I become aware that I am in a body, yes, but it is a body connected to these trees, and we are breathing together.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“They planned our thirst for centuries.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“Drought is an old war.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“REDWOODS The first time I entered a forest I saw the trees, of course, huddled together in rings, thin veils of mist between their branches, some dead but still standing, or fallen thigh bones on the desiccated floor, but I also saw the great buttery platters of fungus climbing like stepping stones up their shaggy trunks: tzadee, tzadee, tzadee, each a different size: small to large or large to small, as if some rogue architect had been cocky enough to install them on the stunned trees’ northern sides, leading up to the balcony of their one ton boughs. I was here to investigate my place among them, these giants, 3000 years old, still here, living in my lifetime. I should have felt small, a mere human—petty in my clumsy boots, burrs in my socks, while these trees held a glossary of stars in their crowns, their heads up there in the croissant-shaped clouds, the wisdom of the ages flowing up through from root to branchlet— though rather I felt large inside my life, the sum of Jung’s archetypes: the self, the shadow, the anima, the persona of my personhood fully recognized and finally accepted, the nugget of my being, my shadow of plush light. I felt like I was climbing up those fungal discs toward something endless, beyond my birth and death, into my here-ness and now-ness, the scent and silence overwhelming me, seeping back into my pores. You had to have been there to know such joy, fear intermingled, my limbs tingling: ancient, mute.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“YOU MUST BE PRESENT, i say to myself when the what wheres all up in the how now—trees! i turn to the trees for relief & they say nah! don’t look at us. you don’t even know our names. you don’t even know the difference between an oak tree & a maple tree. it’s true: my relationship with (love) (nature) (money) (fill in the blank) is like my relationship to weather— i only see it when it’s pouring on my head. i’m sorry to the trees i grew up with. i didn’t ask. i never learned. or even wondered (about their names). (their families) (their longings) i only dreamed of (me) climbing onto their shoulders. honestly, i was a ladybug to them—only heavier & more annoying. those trees i grew up with were generations older than me. they were practiced at living in a way i will never understand & all i could imagine was the view from their crown. oak trees. they were oak trees with their own history of migration. rooted in calumet city like me. if i asked them for answers, i wouldn’t have understood: sunlight. water. sunlight. water. sunlight. water.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“In the forest, grief lives a new life as devotion. Early August leaves play at color before surrendering to both man-made ground and messy slopes collecting undergrowth. I wonder what’s past resistance to change, on the other side of fear. If I don’t look down, or walk away. Step over the snake instead, realize both living and dying require giving up.”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World