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“If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: The place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off; abandoned.
-Barry Lopez: We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight”
―
-Barry Lopez: We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight”
―
“When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions.”
― The Rediscovery of North America
― The Rediscovery of North America
“The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent inits meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.”
― Arctic Dreams
― Arctic Dreams
“I mean the kind of roots that happen privately between you and a certain place. Like you come to a place, and instead of planting a flag and saying mine, the place plants something in you. The place claims you, it knows your name and the crooked corners of your heart, and you've pledged yourself to it before you've even realized what's happening.”
― A Lesson in Thorns
― A Lesson in Thorns
“It is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless.
Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.
The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.”
― Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays
Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.
The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.”
― Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays
Michele’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Michele’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
925 books
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54 friends
301 books
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48 friends
335 books
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77 friends
0 books
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88 friends
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Michele
Lists liked by Michele
