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55a9483 Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. daring courage discovery inspirational exploration Andre Gide
b5331ee We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. nature unexplorable unfathomable wildness explore exploration wild land mystery sea mysterious wilderness Henry David Thoreau
fec64bd A story is not like a road to follow ... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. discovery writing exploration creative-process stories Alice Munro
2666f43 Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away. stars skywatcher exploration nocturnal space night-sky Carl Sagan
f475993 "The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. spirituality transcendance exploration meditation infinite journey Jules Verne
bf6f72c The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. science solar-system exploration Carl Sagan
6b3edf6 Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself. robots exploration Neil deGrasse Tyson
bd990e3 Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it. exploration arrogance Tahir Shah
e33702c My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way. There was sanctuary in a library, there is sanctuary now, from the war, from the storms of our family and our own anxious minds. Libraries are like the mountain, or the meadows behind the goat lady's house: sacred space. libraries exploration sacred-spaces sanctuary Anne Lamott
60b729b "I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life." fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
1b5937c Exploration is a dirty game. exploration game fairness Tahir Shah
6478149 A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky's stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I'll not go northing this year. I'll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow's fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow's seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming. fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
ced89d5 When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains. travel memories nature wandering novelty exploration walking Rebecca Solnit
9b573e9 "The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts. Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath. But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can't recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees." fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
7879b53 I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach. fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching trees growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
f1f3c26 "In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, "When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you." fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
d90ee72 It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson's Bay. It was as if the season's colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath. fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
b488979 "All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam's waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam's curse. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee." A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia." fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
900bb3a And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun's surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now? fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
e10680f "Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won't see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. "For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see," says Ruysbroeck, "and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else." But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn't make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn't catch the consonant that shaped it into sense." fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul longing poet creation Annie Dillard
e8657a9 "Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, a good time to be living." And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "yes, that's how it was then, that part there was called France." I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes. fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
3b41102 "Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, "an infinite storm of beauty." The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth's face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth's surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life." fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
6744dc1 Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings...They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn't that have been a sight to see? fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
74cbd64 The Piri Reis map of 1513 features the western shores of Africa and the eastern shores of North and South America and is also controversially claimed to depict Ice Age Antarctica--as an extension of the southern tip of South America. The same map depicts a large island lying east of the southeast coast of what is now the United States. Also clearly depicted running along the spine of this island is a 'road' of huge megaliths. In this exact spot during the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age a large island was indeed located until approximately 12,400 years ago. A remnant survives today in the form of the islands of Andros and Bimini. Underwater off Bimini I have scuba-dived on a road of great megaliths exactly like those depicted on the Piri Reis map. Again, the implication, regardless of the separate controversy of whether the so-called Bimini Road is a man-made or natural feature, is that the region must have been explored and mapped before the great floods at the end of the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise and submerged the megaliths. piri-reis-map rising-sea-levels underwater lost-civilization navigation ice-age exploration Graham Hancock
099ad33 Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn't hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients' ultima Thule, the modern explorer's Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis's jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom's nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying? fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
692fb20 She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly. inuit northwest-passage exploration Dan Simmons
0829536 "Xerxes, I read, 'halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction' the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain...you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven't you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered...there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse...and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. "He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life." We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn't it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don't know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore." fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation Annie Dillard
c175582 The suspicion that certain ancient authorities possessed good knowledge of the real shape of the Atlantic and its islands, and of the lands on both sides of it, must also arise from any objective reading of Plato's world-famous account of Atlantis. [...], this story is set around 11,600 years ago -- a date that coincides with a peak episode of global flooding at the end of the Ice Age. The story tells us that 'the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished', that this took place in 'a single dreadful day and night' and that the event was accompanied by earthquakes and floods that were experienced as far away as the eastern Mediterranean. But of more immediate interest to us here is what Plato has to say about the geographical situation in the Atlantic immediately the flood that destroyed Atlantis: 'In those days the Atlantic was navigable. There was an island opposite the strait [the Strait of Gibraltar] which you [the Greeks] call the Pillars of Heracles, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them . For the sea within the strait we are talking about [i.e. the Mediterranean] is like a lake with a narrow entrance; the outer ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it is properly termed continent ... On this land of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings who ruled the whole island; and many other islands as well, and parts of the continent ...' Whether or not one believes than an island called Atlantis ever existed in the Atlantic Ocean, Plato's clear references to an 'opposite continent' on the far side of it are geographical knowledge out of place in time. It is hard to read in these references anything other than an allusion to the Americas, and yet historians assure us that the Americas were unknown in Plato's time and remained 'undiscovered' (except for a few inconsequential Viking voyages) until Colombus in 1492. discovery deluges geography ice-age-civilizations lost-knowledge sea-level-rises exploration lost-civilizations Graham Hancock
87bfbed Though [Marco] Polo himself states frankly that he has never visited Japan -- and thus that what he has to say about it is second-hand and perhaps inaccurate -- the notion of the mysterious island kingdom of Cipango that he planted in European consciousness at the end of the thirteenth century was later one of several powerful influences that spurred Christopher Columbus forward in his crossings of the Atlantic at the end of the fifteenth century. This was so because Columbus -- underestimating the circumference of the earth and knowing nothing of the existence of the Americas or of the Pacific Ocean -- believed that he could reach Cipango, and thence the Chinese mainland beyond, by sailing directly westwards across the Atlantic from Europe. Columbus is also likely to have calculated that Cipango would be reached after only a relatively journey towards the west -- for he had read Marco Polo, who describes Cipango, erroneously, as lying 'far out to sea' fully 1500 miles to the east of the Chinese mainland (the true distance is nowhere much more than 500 miles). inaccuracy exploration consciousness mystery influences Graham Hancock
3edbad8 According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, 'There lies out in the deep off Libya [Africa] an island of considerable size, and situated as it is in the ocean it is a distant from Libya a voyage of a number of days to the west. Its land is fruitful, much of it being mountainous and not a little being a level plain of surpassing beauty. Through it flow navigable rivers ...' Diodorus goes on to tell us how Phoenician mariners, blown off course in a storm, had discovered this Atlantic island with navigable rivers quite by chance. Soon its value was recognized and its fate became the subject of dispute between Tyre and Carthage, two of the great Phoenician cities in the Mediterranean: 'The Tyrians ... purposed to dispatch a colony to it, but the Carthaginians prevented their doing so, partly out of concern lest many inhabitants of Carthage should remove there because of the excellence of the island, and partly in order to have ready in it a place in which to seek refuge against an incalculable turn of fortune, in case some total disaster should overtake Carthage. For it was their thought that since they were masters of the sea, they would thus be able to move, households and all, to an island which was unknown to their conquerors.' Since there are no navigable rivers anywhere to the west of Africa before the seafarer reaches Cuba, Haiti and the American continent, does this report by Diodorus rank as one of the earliest European notices of the New World? history discovery refuge seafarers exploration Graham Hancock
a140b6e Piri Reis is not only remembered for his 1513 map but for another slightly later work, a manual of sailing directions known as the , which also contains references to the book of Columbus. Reported above is Mcintosh's impression from comments made in the that the 'book' Piri is speaking of might have been Ptolemy's . Yet the Turkish scholar Svat Soucek points out that this is not the obvious deduction from the text of the where it touches on 'the great story of the discovery of America': 'The country's name is Antilia, and it was discovered by a Genoese (astronomer-cum-astrologer) named Columbus ... The story goes all the way back to Alexander, who had roamed the whole earth and written a book about it. The book remained in Egypt until the Muslim conquest, when the Franks fled the country, taking the book with them. Little attention was paid to it until Columbus read it and realized the existence of Antilia to the west of the Atlantic. He convinced the king of Spain of the possibility of its discovery and colonization, which he then successfully carried out. geography lost-knowledge exploration Graham Hancock
e64983a To have followed the speculative vision of Behaim in his famous globe, or of others like him, would have been disastrous, even though their work represents the cream of fifteenth-century mapmaking and was known to Columbus. Indeed, as one commentator has observed, if his chart had been based on the Behaim scenario, 'Columbus could not even have known of the whereabouts of the New World, much less discover it.' Yet not only does he seem to have known where he was going but, on some accounts, when he was going to get there: 'Now and then Pinzon and Columbus consult and deliberate -- mutually discuss their route. The map or chart passes not infrequently from the one captain to the other; the observations and calculations as to their position are daily recorded, their conduct and course for the night duly agreed upon. On the eve of their due arrival Columbus issues the order to stay the course of the armada, to shorten sail, because he knew that he was close to the New World and was afraid of going ashore during the obscurity of the night ... How does he know the place and the hour? 'His Genius' says the Columbus legend in explanation. But the Map? The critics will ask, what did it contain? Whose was it? What did that map contain that was so frequently passed from Columbus to Pinzon during the voyage?' I've presented my case that what the map may have contained was an accurate but ancient, and indeed antediluvian, representation of the coast and islands of Central America, notably the north-south-oriented Great Bahama Bank island, which Columbus -- no less ignorant than any of his contemporaries about the existence of the Americas -- took to be an accurate map of part of the coast of China and the islands of Japan. discovery geography ice-age-civilizations lost-knowledge exploration lost-civilizations Graham Hancock
2e9793f It is Professor Fuson's view that Chinese charts of Taiwan and Japan were the source of the 1424 portrayal of Antilia and Satanaze. He makes a very persuasive case that such charts are likely to have originated from the seven spectacular voyages of discovery made by the famous Ming admiral Cheng Ho between 1405 and 1433. [...] Much suggests, however, that Robert Fuson is correct to deduce that the charts of Taiwan and Japan that somehow found their way into the hands of Zuane Pizzagano in Venice in 1424 must have originated from the voyages of Cheng Ho. Yet there is a problem. [...] Antilia and Satanaze on the 1424 chart don't show Taiwan and Japan as they looked in the time of Cheng Ho, but rather as they looked approximately 12,500 years ago during the meltdown of the Ice Age. Is it possible that Cheng Ho, too, like Columbus, was guided in his voyages by ancient maps and charts, come down from another time and populated by the ghosts of a drowned world? discovery geography ice-age-civilizations lost-knowledge exploration lost-civilizations Graham Hancock
425d1d1 "The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides" sax-russell conciousness exploration space-exploration mars Kim Stanley Robinson
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