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I like Kansas—that is, natural Kansas—better than I had expected to.
—Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey (1859)
There is a look about men who come from sojourning in that country, as if the sheer nakedness of the land had somehow driven the soul back upon its elemental impulses.
—Mary Austin,
The Flock (1906)
Our last instruction to our new explorer and frontiersman is to hold ever in sight his final goal—to reveal within our innate country a land in which to live, a symphonious environment of melody and mystery.
—Benton MacKaye,
The New Exploration: A Philosophy
of Regional Planning (1928)
The greater number of landscapes I explored, the more it seemed that they had traits in common and that the essence of each was not its uniqueness but its similarity to others. It occurred to me that there might be such a thing as a prototypal landscape, or, more precisely, landscape as a primordial idea, of which all these visible landscapes were merely so many imperfect manifestations.
Such concepts as karma and circular time are taken for granted by almost all American Indian traditions; time as space and death as becoming are implicit in the earth-view of the Hopi, who avoid all linear constructions, knowing as well as any Buddhist that Everything is Right Here Now. As in the great religions of the east, the American Indian makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of everyday: the religious ceremony is life itself.
—Peter Matthiessen,
The Snow Leopard (1978)
The truly wise person kneels at the feet of all creatures and is not afraid to endure the mockery of others.
—Mechtild of Magdeburg,
The Flowing Light of the Godhead (1265)
Our faith imposes on us a right and duty to throw ourselves into things of the earth.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
The Divine Milieu (1957)
What we are all more or less lacking at this moment is a new definition of holiness.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
Human Energy (1969)
In the same way that civilized men had cleared the earth, pruned back the forests, planted villages, towns, and cities, so had Christianity stripped its world of magic and mystery, and of the possibility of spiritual renewal through itself. In cutting down the sacred trees in the mystic groves, in building sanctuaries on the rubble of chthonic shrines, and in branding all vestiges of ancient mythic practices vain, imperious superstition, the Church has effectively removed divinity from its world. But its victory here was Pyrrhic, for it had rendered its people alienated sojourners in a spiritually barren world where the only outlet for the urge to life was the restless drive onward—what Norman O. Brown has called the desire to become. Eventually this drive would leave the religion itself behind.
We deeply require an earthy spirituality.
—Matthew Fox,
Original Blessing (1983)
So I ask myself if I can still remember
How a myth began this morning and how the people
Seemed hardly to know that something was starting over.
—Thomas Hornsby Ferril,
Westering (1934)
We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it is. We must see the years to come in the frame that makes space and time one.
Our philosophies must be rewritten to remove them from the domain of words and “ideas,” and to plant their roots firmly in the earth.
—William Vogt,
Road to Survival (1948)
The ancients, one would say, with their gorgons, sphinxes, satyrs, mantichora, etc., could imagine more than existed, while the moderns cannot imagine so much as exists.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1860)
Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfilment in reflection and study. Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape, and assert themselves with imperious authority. He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period.
—Joris-Karl Huysmans,
Against Nature (1884)
The imaginative experience and the historical express equally the traditions of man’s reality. Finally, then, the journey recalled is among other things the revelation of one way in which these traditions are conceived, developed, and interfused in the human mind.
—N. Scott Momaday,
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
Above all else, the world displays a lovely order, an order comforting in its intricacy. And the most appealing part of this harmony, perhaps, is its permanence—the sense that we are part of something with roots stretching back nearly forever and branches reaching forward just as far. Purely human life provides only a partial fulfillment of this desire for a kind of immortality.
—Bill McKibben,
The End of Nature (1989)
This is the immense threat—that when we lose one set of connections we end up severed from all connectedness.
—Tony Hiss,
“Encountering the Countryside” (1989)
Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.
—E. M. Forster,
Howard’s End (1911)
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
—Wendell Berry,
The Unsettling of America (1977)
Forgetfulness of having been would be a break in the chain. We mean absolute forgetfulness; for the possibility of momentary forgetfulness, in which the persistence of the personality loses nothing, is proved by sleep. Our life on earth is probably a kind of sleep. The immortality of the soul is nothing other than the universal cohesion of creation ruling the individual as it rules the universe.
What this cohesion is, what this immanence, is impossible to imagine. It is at once the amalgam out of which solidarity is born, and the self which creates directions. It is all explained in the word, Radiation.
The interweaving of creatures with their emanations is creation. We are simultaneously points of arrival and points of departure.
—Victor Hugo,
The Toilers of the Sea (1866)
One achieves a slow, indelible intimacy with place, learning to match its moods with one’s own. At such times it is as if a destination had awaited us with nearly human expectation and with an exquisite blend of receptivity and detachment.
—Shirley Hazzard,
“Points of Departure” (1983)
The prairie path leads to the sky path; the paths are one: the continents are two; and you must make your journey from the prairies to the sky.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
[Black Elk said:] Black Road and Bear Sings then sang a song, and all the others sang along with them, like this:
Father, paint the earth on me.
Father, paint the earth on me.
Father, paint the earth on me.
A nation I will make over.
A two-legged nation I will make holy.
Father, paint the earth on me.
—John G. Neihardt,
Black Elk Speaks (1932)