The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life. Barry Lopez More Quotes by Barry Lopez More Quotes From Barry Lopez When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more than we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language. In these ways we begin, I think, to find a home, to sense how to fit a place. Barry Lopez intelligent nature home To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together. Barry Lopez nature rivers hands The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes. Barry Lopez land mind character If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. Barry Lopez alive stories giving We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone's calling, to lead a life that helps. Barry Lopez calling helping world Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive. Barry Lopez loneliness exercise night The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard...be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there. Barry Lopez land simple attitude Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. Barry Lopez compassion heart love One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. Barry Lopez excellence light expression Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. Barry Lopez giving memories people To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe. Barry Lopez imagination giving order I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth. Barry Lopez soul heart inspirational The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it. Barry Lopez land mean way real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it. Barry Lopez real darkness moving We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it. Barry Lopez universe One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret. Barry Lopez regret nature dream Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. Barry Lopez stories inspire needs Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget. Barry Lopez sublime giving years Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? Barry Lopez political technology rivers Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary. Barry Lopez diverse-society space mean
