"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond." — Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." — John Muir John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
"I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world. But I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air. All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird—all are one." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"For the duller and fainter we became the clearer was our vision, though only in momentary glimpses. Then, after the sky cleared, we gazed at the stars, blessed immortals of light, shining with marvelous brightness with long lance rays, near-looking and new-looking, as if never seen before." — John Muir Steep Trails
"I had not known that the sunrise was so lavish and that you could actually feel the color when it reached your face." — Craig Childs The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
"Where the water fell clear of the rock icicles hang, thick as a thigh, many feet in length, and sometimes when the wind blows the falling water askew as it freezes, the icicles are squint. I have seen icicles like a scimitar blade in shape, firm and solid in their place. For once, even the wind has been fixed." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"Taking the same trail in the opposite direction is like walking on the other side of time. Everything looks different on the way back. Same trees, same stobs and snags. Same switchbacks and curves; same vistas, same fallen tree bridge across the creek. But going back the way you came, it’s just as easy to lose your footing, but it’s harder to get lost. The light shines on things you didn’t notice on the way there. The path back, it’s the story you tell yourself, afterward." — Alexis M. Smith Marrow Island
