soliloquies in the outdoors
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes. -Gilbert K. Chesterton That what we term beauty is a high relative concept, and even the most unwieldy nuances …
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. -D. H. Lawrence The avifauna seem to treat the seasons without a shed of diffidence that other animals might care to display… be it the sun or the snow, …
They say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant. – Bill Murray The pachyderm, as a whole, seem rather content in a general sort of aloofness to mortality… that there are very few predatory threats definitely plays a part… there’s no pricking up of the ears or …
Creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambezi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet and then became suddenly compressed into a space of fifteen to twenty yards. -David Livingstone …
History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene. -Desmond Tutu The fading light is like a steam iron, smoothing over the corrugations …
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind, Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame. – W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire We stray too far, in the simple act of subsistence that seems almost …
The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did… – Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart the reptilian world has generally been designated to embody negative traits in the constructs of human imagination for as long as one can comprehend, from the sacred annals …
Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. – John Muir the leitmotif of any mountain, any protrusion that can make its surroundings feel insignificant, would unarguably be divinity… the sanctitude offered by the higher climes more often that not …
…she learned words that rolled from her tongue when no one was listening. Firns and striations. Cirques and moraines. Adulation. Sublimation. She fell asleep to their music, and she woke to it. Chatter marks, eskers, and drumlins. Truncated spurs. Corries and tarns. Kames. Eolian loess. Katabatic winds… – Deb Vanasse, Cold Spell Moraines are what …
Romanticism is one of those luxuries that evolution seems to have bestowed upon us once the issues of subsistence and food chain were dealt with… ask it to pump up the adrenalin for a daredevilry, or cough up some dopamine for a ruminating poem, and seldom shall it fail to oblige… the philosophy of spiritual …