Ellen Meloy Quotes
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I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.
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I hope to make pictures like I walk in the desert—under a spell, an instinct of motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways.Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home–not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
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That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of small note to many of us. We think, abstractly, that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us by the sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live.
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The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.
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Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of effects—a “cascade of consequences” precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be.
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Airtight allegiance to place could make you a loser, left behind by the great sweep of a monochromatic, generalist world.
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Before Alaska came along and ruined everything, one of every twenty-five square miles in America was Montanan. This much space has nurtured a healthy Cult of Place in which people find perfection, even divinity in the landscape.
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The only certainty is the certainty of what they leave behind: thunder in August, heart-crushing love affairs with the light, no money. How warm air rises from the valleys at noon and comes down cool from the high country as the sun goes down. How the ground beneath your feet shapes your muscles. How where you live—the locale—makes you who you are.
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When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.
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Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
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Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.
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This deranged jungle of ironies coinhabits my skull like feathers and fireworks. My heart fills with stones. I am the mad aunt who laughs her head off at the funeral. There rises in me the most inappropriate hysteria in this most somber of places.
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For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.
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Shall we be honest about this? The mind needs wild animals. The body needs the trek that takes it looking for them.
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...to slip beneath the surface and soar along the silent bottom of the sea agile and shining in water honeycombed with light.
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Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.
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When the world began, it was very small. Songs blew the earth up to its present size. Songs turn frustration into power, anxiety into comfort. Like a blanket, they form a zone of protection around the singer. Sing on the way home alone at night in a fearful place and the song will move out into the space around you. Is this not prayer, sounds that come from our breath, lifting the spirit as they meet the air?
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An ellipse of pale rose sand lines the inside of a river bend of such beauty, you could set yourself on fire with the rapture of that curve. In it lies a kind of music in stone that might cure all emptiness.
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Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains... mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel...
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It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country.
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In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding—maybe a little food—can set the world right.
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Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.
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My geography savors a delicious paradox: Home - a grounding - found in unearthly beauty. The predominant colors are blue, emerald, and terra-cotta. Every day, every season, I taste these colors and the intricate flavors of their unaccountable tones and hues. I have yet to earn this land. Perhaps I never will. Home is a religion. Sensibly you understand the need for it, yet not even sensible people can explain it.
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There are people who have no engaged conversation with the land whatsoever, no sense of its beauty or extremes or limits and therefore no reason to question their actions in a place that is merely backdrop.