Nature Writers

 

 

 

 

Nature Writers

 

 

"Traveling to a strange new landscape is a kind of romance. You become intensely aware of the world where you are, but also oblivious to the rest of the world at the same time. Like love, travel makes you innocent again.


My mind will become a cyclone of intense alertness, in which details present themselves slowly, thoroughly, one at a time. I don't know how to describe what happens  to me when I'm out in 'nature' and 'working'-- it's a kind of rapture -- but it's happened often enough that I know what to expect.


But my prose now seems to locate me among a small tribe often referred to as nature writers. How curious that label is, suggesting as it does that nature is somehow separate from our doings, that nature does not contain us, that it's possible to step outside nature, ... Still, the label is a dignified one, and implies a pastoral ethic that we share, a devotion to the keenly observed detail, and a sense of sacredness. There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer."





Excerpt from:

 The Moon By Whale Light   (The Moon By Whale Light)

 by  Diane Ackerman  c 1991