The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urge...
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak...
Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
What we dream of is already present in the world.
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A cit...
Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence....
The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspen...
Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters,wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a...
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?'Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit
This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a cu...
The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mount...
Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew...
Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.
A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The nar...
The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we...
Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits...
It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free...