"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

14 May 2017

Processes.


If you spend a lot of time in the woods and see a lot of bears, obviously you reach a point where you know a bear is not just a bear and a wolf is not just a wolf. In that sense it's what Wallace Stevens said, "We were all Indians once." If you really study crows and ravens for a long time, you don't overlook their splendors and peculiarities. Most of the bad attitudes against the natural world, of course, come from utter ignorance of the processes of the natural world. If you really knew what a river was you couldn't dump all that garbage in it, but most of the people who dump the garbage in the river don't have any idea what a river is.

Jim Harrison

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