If ever there were a person who truly understood and appreciated life for all of its beautiful quirks and intricacies, however infinitesimal, it would be Miss Annie Dillard.
This woman makes me want to renounce my possessions and pitch camp deep in the woods somewhere, concealed and undetected;
Rising and falling with the sun, pulsing with the wind; my blood coursing through my body to the rhythm of flowing water...
I am currently reading Dillard's Pulitzer Prize awarded novel, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it is just spectacular.
She has truly excelled in the art of looking deep into nature to provoke a better understanding of the world and of life in general.
I wanted to take this opportunity to share some of my favorite quotes from the book, though I highly recommend that you read it yourself.
We are all but one interconnected flow of energy on this spectacular planet.
Much love. xx
“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
“After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...”
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”
“It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.”
“I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.”
All quotes from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Buy it here.
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