Sally Carrighar

“The sunrise across the wild northern lake seemed a kind of holiness that human chatter was bound to destroy a little. The water, so still and lucent, beyond it the dark forest, and the fir’s fragrance; for this sacred experience, enjoyed alone, I would get up at dawn every day during the summer. Being there began to seem almost the same experience as making music, as the way, when I played the piano, I was the music, my physical body feeling as if it dissolved in the sounds. I could say my dimensions then were those of the melodies and the harmony that spread out from the piano in all directions. Walking in the forest …was not a wide going out and out, as with music, but again of losing myself-nature herself does not name flowers, the important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blueness becomes as real as a keynote of music…


Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson”
― Sally Carrighar