Dead Stones

There would be times when birds would land on the rusted machinery. — Cormac McCarthy, The Road The house was slowly being consumed by vines. — Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation Ruins are not dead stones. They are the homes of birds and ivy. — Unattributed Every ruin is the remnant of a human intention. — W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. — Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks The trees were sending messages through the roots. — Richard Powers, The Overstory
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. — T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
...when people are afraid of heights
and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
and the grasshopper drags itself along
and desire no longer is stirred.
Then people go to their eternal home
and mourners go about the streets. — Ecclesiastes 12:5



The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first; Nature is incomprehensible always. — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Earth’s crammed with heaven. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh The living mountain is not a solitude but a crowd. — Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. — Wendell Berry, Given In wildness is the preservation of the world. — Henry David Thoreau, Walking Wildness is not just the preservation of the world, it is the world. — Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac We can never have enough of nature. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. — John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. — Henry Beston, The Outermost House The city itself is only a form through which nature flows. — Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild The house was built on the edge of the swamp. — William Faulker, Absalom Absalom Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—the earth remains slightly modified. — Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire The machine invades the earth. — Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America The birds have vanished into the sky, / and now the last cloud drains away. — Li Bai, Drinking Alone with the Moon
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Tithonus

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

— Gerard Hopkins

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

   There is society where none intrudes,

   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

   From these our interviews, in which I steal

   From all I may be, or have been before,

   To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

— Lord Byron