Julian Hoffman > Quotes

“The day suddenly stilled while I watched, held in place by the mesmeric sunlight; orchids in purple splashes across the pale slopes; the insistent insect drone; the scent of ancient junipers unfolding on the air. Eternity can be anytime, any day or night, seen in the closing of a nightjar bird’s eyes. While something as small as a worm’s home can house the infinite.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“I feel an affinity with the limestone…the place has absorbed me into its pattern. I’m encircled by an expanse of dissolving land, an entrancing work of water worn away over ineffable ages beneath the same passing sun. And over the months, I’ve understood this landscape’s capacity to alter my perception. It has opened me to the unfathomable beauty of distance and deep time, but also proximity; the things revealed when we draw near.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“At times we need to turn away from a place when it no longer suits or sustains us, when our ability to adapt to its vagaries has run its course.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“I have been increasingly drawn to what is simple and close to hand, as well as farther afield. I’ve learned that if I’m looking carefully and openly, with all my attention focused on that moment, on the small things that might surface in a given space, that I don’t have to go very far.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“Some days the other shore seems far away. It rises in the blue distance like a mirage until it eventually untangles from the haze, only there if you look long enough, staring across the lake as though seeking land in an empty sea. But other days don’t ask patience of you, the kind of stillness to see things through. They open willingly, fortuitously, revealing unforeseen moments nested within.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“Home is an idea, a complicated human construct often built over unstable foundations. It’s an idea informed by intricate cultural traditions, frequently contingent on coincidence and unforeseen circumstances…The instinct to home is widespread all the same, even when the response is to keep moving, to never stay in one place. While being at home suggests a settling-down, a physical presence in a given location, it also concerns being at home, settled and at ease with one’s ways and surroundings, even if that entails being continually on the move. The varieties of home are many, as profoundly unique as the beings that seek and create them. Its forms are a testament to diversity.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“The stones sing as the sun begins to fall. There is a quality to the karst country light that is mesmeric, spilling over the grasslands, bathing the ridges and rolling hills in a deep and reflection radiance. It is as though it were a relic luminescence, a memory of when this plateau was still an ocean; that in the compacted shells of the marine creatures that have surfaced into stone there remains a trace of what was pelagic about them, an unalloyed and ethereal echo of sunlight striking sea.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“As I followed the shoreline tracks of the bears, I became aware of a different way of thinking. Walking in the steps of the bears brought me closer to their world. Something of my own solidity was suspended and I opened, however imperfectly, to another way of being.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“While our span of allotted time simply isn’t enough to devote ourselves to more than a handful of specific terrains in the measured and meticulous manner made possible by a long tenure, we can cultivate an openness that deepens our experience of wherever we are, for however brief a period, by fostering in each moment a constant and attentive awareness to what is there in the slanting light, within reach of our fingers, and near enough to taste. To be at home in the world is to let ourselves be drawn into it.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“At the heart of this book is a belief best articulated by the artist Alan Gussow: “The catalyst that converts any physical location- any environment- into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of a whole environment that has been claimed by feelings. Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment. Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“It reached me as an afterglow. We were walking on a cliff edge path when a faint light glimmered at the corner of my eye. I stopped and looked down at the sea for a while, reluctantly accepting that it must have been the sparkling roll of a wave that I’d seen, a crest of bright water. I’d taken a few more steps along the path when I saw it again, fleetingly, like a vague memory dredged from the depths…I was still holding my breath when the silver arch of a dolphin broke the surface and caught the sun on its flukes. About a dozen bottle-nosed dolphins made up the pod. I later realized how time had dissolved while we watched the dolphins. Past and future, and all the weight they carry, had folded into one clear, immeasurable moment. I was aware of feeling an ineffable joy, and lightness of being.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“Certain places follow us, like shadows. At times they lengthen and stretch implausibly tall until they tower over our lives, or slant decisively away, as if trying to flee. Occasionally they appear not to be there at all- so exact is the overlay of self and place, so precise the meridian sun. Whether seen or not they are undoubtedly close, tethered by subtle threads spooling us forever back. Either in memory or actuality, even dreams, to landscapes that articulate something of our selves.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“We are continually capable of deepening our acquaintance with an environment, of becoming intimate with more than one place, of being at home where we find ourselves. In an age when the ecological integrity of our planet is threatened on so many levels, anything that strengthens those connections, or makes meaningful our daily arrangement with the world around us, is a form of resistance, a kind of love forged with home that has the potential to be fiercely protective”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“Some days outlive others. They are lit differently in memory- as resplendently as the squacco heron at the edge of the pool or the dolphins glimmering at sea- and they are brushed with an intensity that seems to suspend the customary passage of time. I have come to see them as wrapped like a chrysalis in light; days that have left me feeling closer to the world, connected in some intangible way to its rhythms. Watching the dolphins had reminded me to be more generous in my seeing, to be aware of small things, the rustles and faint shadows that accompany possibility, the murmurs at every turn.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“I descend in a dream-which isn’t ideal when you’re meant to be paying close attention- but sometimes the land and the seasons, the weather and the light, can do that, burrowing down toward a still, reflective point, a heartwood more essential than a tree’s. Letting the wild world in until we’re tangled up together”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World

“The afternoon circled toward dusk, its last light suspended in an amber glow. I walked out over the tough grasses and flinty stone of the steppe, needing a few moments to be alone. I wished to breathe deeply in that vast landscape awash in light and mystery. These days and places are affirmations; they approach the numinous. The beckoning steppe, and the creatures it harbored, was revealed as radiantly and assiduously as moon passing out of eclipse. It was as if the spirit of the place had become visible, had for a brief creak of time taken material form. I stood and watched how the light fell, flaring the flatlands in a copper-edged glow, sending silver sparks skimming across the endless sea.”
― Julian Hoffman, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World