Walking induces a trance like state that allows the mind freedom and ease and encourages exploration of odd possibilities and improbable connections.
-Annie Proulx, from Bird Cloud pg 194-95

[found on my walk, Feb 22, 2012]

[polka dot leaf, unaltered, found on my walk, Feb 19 2012]

A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is simply a pile of inert ore ready to be mined. A child raised to revere the coastal rainforest as the realm of the divine will be a different person from a child taught to believe that such forests are destined to be logged.

-Wade Davis, from his 2009 Massey Lecture, The Wayfinders:Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

[pencil eraser print]

O imagination, you who have the power to impose yourself on our faculties and our wills, stealing us away from the outer world and carrying us off into an inner one, so that even if a thousand trumpets were to sound we would not hear them, what is the source of the visual messages that you receive, if they are not formed from sensations deposited in the memory?
~Dante

My piece for the Nowhere Island project is live. Hope you enjoy it!

Research link:

The Utopian founders were seers; they understood the hidden but pre-established language of the world; they had no need to create a second language, it was enough to be receptive to the language that was.

-Carlos Fuentes, from the introduction to 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Modern Library edition)

“Magician” was used to describe anyone who possessed any kind of occult knowledge, by occult I mean “hidden”, unknown to the common people. Thanks to such hidden knowledge the magician can make extraordinary things happen. The spirit of magic is about cracking nature’s secret codes. In order to use them for the benefit of the largest number of people.

-Ferdinando Buscema, from his insightful Tedtalk.