Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Tasting Grace in Wild Spaces

[Photo: Chance Cove, Trinity Bay. Copyright: Lewis Greenland]

"People need wild places... We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully."

Barbara Kingsolver

5 comments:

clairesgarden said...

you're photo tagged!

love the wind post, its ben really windy here too, lots of fresh!!

Tony said...

The respect for wild places or places where we can find solitude is something we kayakers have in common. The key for me is to make sure we don't use it like any of the other commodities in our lives. Leave it wild and untouched as much as possible.

Tony :-)

Alison Dyer said...

Hi Claire, just another thing that Scotland & Nfld have in common!
Hi Tony, you're right there.

Michael said...

Who could argue with Tony and Barbara's statements? I only hope we all have the wisdom to leave the wild untouched and pass our love for it on to our children.
It's also great to see the cliffs of Chance Cove again. I'd forgotten how high they are!

Alison Dyer said...

Michael, this is one of Lewis Greenland's photos from a couple of years ago. Lewis takes marvellous photos. I have a print of this one in my home office: the kayakers barely larger than the bald eagle, dwarfed by a vertical mass of solid rock. It is magnificent and Chance Cove, so accessible, may be the best place for an afternoon paddle.

And don't you just adore Kingsolver's prose. She's right up there with Rachel Carson in my books.