Joyce

“I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“When you give yourself wholly to a piece of ground, its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion. You will never be alone the same way again, and never quite dislocated. Your heart will grow down into and back out of that ground like a tree.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“For now, I want to sit vigil with the earth the same way I did with Fenton. I want to write unironic odes to her beauty, which is still potent, if not completely intact. The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it was face-to-face with my familiar koan: how to be with the incandescent beauty of the iceberg without grieving the loss of polar bear habitat its appearance implied. How to grieve the polar bear without loving it any less. How to let the sight of such a strange and beautiful thing as this floating jewel make me happy, as wild and surprising things have always done, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. How to hang on to that full-body joy I knew I was capable of and still understand it as elegy?”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country