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dd983b7
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A map, it is said, organizes wonder.
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Ellen Meloy |
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6992340
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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269d0eb
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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50f34b0
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I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.
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Ellen Meloy |
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8f6c0b8
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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b022182
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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57df98e
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have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own worlds, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we do finally encounter wild animals, we are quite surprised by the sheer of them. Each time I look into the eye of an animal...I find myself staring into a mirror of my own imagination. What I see there is deeply, crazily, unmercifully confused. Th..
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Ellen Meloy |
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cb7d89a
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In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet..
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Ellen Meloy |
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cc302b9
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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. - from the Chapter "Finding..
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Ellen Meloy |
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dc23d3a
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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dbbe961
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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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environment
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Ellen Meloy |
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0a91a25
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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3ec7fb3
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A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an "Or..
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Ellen Meloy |
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485ec4c
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How do I stop this misery?" I groaned, scanning the shelves for a cure. "Don't go out there," he said flatly. I contemplated this reasonable observation for about sixteen seconds. Move to town. Hang out at the laundromat. Have eight children. Then I melted back into the pinon-juniper forest."
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Ellen Meloy |
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c3987e7
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I was a lowly puddle of plasma, trading "I am alive" for a vague "I tend to exist" and weeping for joy over the sheer revelation."
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Ellen Meloy |
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f82c848
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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c81ecb6
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The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico's flank. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. Like the ocean currents, airflow also moves in a circular pattern, captive to the earth's rotation, pulled one way or the other on either side of the equator: the Coriolis effect. This force can act upon the spiraling of water down drains, counterclockwise..
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Ellen Meloy |
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c68f60d
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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. B
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Ellen Meloy |
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0269e30
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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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Ellen Meloy |
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4dfc413
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Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for..
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Ellen Meloy |