Reading, like speech, is an ancient, preliterate craft. We read the tracks and scat of animals, the depth and luster of their coats, the set of their ears and the gait of their limbs. We read the horns of sheep, the teeth of horses. We read the weights and measures of the wind, the flight of birds, the surface of the sea, snow, fossils, broken rocks, the growth of shrubs and trees and lichens. We also read, of course, the voices that we hear. We read the speech of jays, ravens, hawks, frogs, wolves, and, in infinite detail, the voices, faces, gestures, coughs and postures of other human beings. This is a serious kind of reading, and it antedates all but the earliest, most involuntary writing, which is the leaving of prints and traces, the making of tracks.
-Robert Bringhurst

“What we call our power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” -- C. S. Lewis

...we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

--Thoreau

Fight to save a sea-gull's wings:

That would be a sacred war.

--Robinson Jeffers

There's an art of attending to weather, to the route you take, to the land's marks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don't stop to read it.

--Rebecca Solnit

ALL THE WORM TRAILS UNDERNEATH THE BARK

OF A GIANT FOREST

write a name in a script

I cannot translate.

And I do not care to.

--Michael McClure

The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sing best.

--Thoreau

The Black Woods Figures

I painted these years ago, when I was interminably unemployed in Portland. I think they're 5X8, but don't remember for sure.