Deborah Gorman, Artist

According to the Bible, Adam named the animals. Once mankind named them, they seemed ours to do with as we wished. Yet we were never as distant as we thought, and if we are learning anything in the Anthropocene, it is that we are not really separate from the plants and animals. An important part of the landscape now, our built environments are also an expression of nature--termites erect mounds, humans erect farms and cities--and can be more, or less, sustainable. The choice is ours.

Diane Ackerman, NY Times, 8/31/14

Morning in the red and gold desert.

Last nights dreams of being lost

only dreams.

I have my place on this earth. 

The god of this day beats his black wings overhead

sure of where he's going.

Sun strikes yellow rock walls 

sending the cold night off.

What does the god of this day want me to give away?

Will I hear him if he speaks?

Geese and Raven call from the east and south.

The sounds of man's oil drinking machines bounce

over the canyon walls

eaten by the red earth.

Now the wind, now the wing, now silence.

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water.......T. S. Eliot

"I have been reading comparative cosmology. At this time most cosmologists favor the picture of the evolving universe described by Lemaitre and Gamow. But I prefer a suggestion made years ago by Valery--Paul Valery. He set forth the notion that the universe might be 'head shaped.' "

Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk

Poem:

Summer sweated and soared,

a delirious goddess

with a hot crush

on the cool rocks and

the raw blue skies.

Lanquid 

honey breasted season,

your peach light vision

shines on

day after elaborate day

whispering

a lazy symphony

about love's essential place

in time.

dg Copper Canyon 

Ten Thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, 

a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. 

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, 

this is the best season of your life.  Wu-Men

"Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?"

John Constable