Rhiannon

“The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, ‘each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints'. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. Thus the world was covered by ‘Dreaming-tracks’ that ‘lay over the land as “ways” of communication’, each track having its corresponding Song.... To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

“I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“The only thing left to her keeping were a bloody old rag and a creased photograph of the ocean which she held pressed to the hollow of her slender throat and had thrashed for and bit hands to protect like a madwoman risen from sleep to in her unformed state between wake and dream reproach the world tenfold.”
― Robert Gatewood, The Sound of the Trees