"Teaching a Stone to Talk"

More:

• The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting... yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
• People who survive bad burns: drugs just leak away,soaking the sheets, because there is no skin to hold them in.
• From the hill the distant creek looked still and loaded with sky.
• In winter it had that airy scruffiness of deciduous lands;Once I lost them behind the mountain ridge; when they emerged they were flying suddenly very high, and it was like music changing key.
• I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its pose and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living, the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.
• What (a mangrove island) is most likely to do is drift anywhere in the alien ocean, feeding on death and growing, netting a makeshift soil as it goes, shrimp in its toes and terns in its hair.
• The yellow afternoon light has faded from the water and the blue evening light is fading.
• I assume that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. ('Teaching a Stone to Talk')

'Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos'

• There is a way a small island rises from the ocean affronting all reason.. here instead of not at all. It is a fantastic utterance.. It smacks of folly, of first causes.
• These dark pelagic birds flick along pleated seas in stitching flocks, flailing their wings rapidly - because if they don't, they'll stall... If the flight angle is precisely right, the shearwater will fold its wings at the hole's entrance and stall directly onto its floor.
• its pristine ignorance, its blithe failure to register a flight trigger at the sweep of my descending hand
• Species arise in isolation. A plaster cast is an intricate as its mold; life is a gloss on geography.
• Everywhere freedom twines its way around necessity, inventing new strings of occasions, lassoing time and putting it through its varied and spirited paces. Everywhere live things lash at the rocks.
• Life and the rocks, like sprite and matter, are a fringed matrix, lapped and lapping, clasping and held. . It is like hand washing hand and the whole tumult hurled.
• The planet spins, rapt inside its intricate mists. <> What shall we sing, while the fire burns down? We can sing only specifics, time's rambling tune, the places we have seen, the faces we have known.

<<