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I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

Barry Lopez

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Barry Lopez
Age: 75 †
Born: 1945
Born: January 6
Died: 2020
Died: December 25
Author
Photographer
Writer
Port Chester
New York
Barry Holstun Lopez
Fear
Pull
Sometimes
Lays
Something
Hunger
Like
Animals
World
Blood
Eerie
Share
Backward
Animal
Salt
Knowing
Ties

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If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.
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The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.
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My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who've been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we're living in, I put my faith in those people.
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The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.
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One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.
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It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.
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No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.
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The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
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If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
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Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.
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It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.
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The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard...be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.
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Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
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There's so much to be afraid of.
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The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
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You can't learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.
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If I were to offer any advice to young writers, it would be this: be discriminating and be discerning about the work you set for yourself. That done, be the untutored traveler, the eager reader, the enthusiastic listener. Put what you learn together carefully, and then write thoughtfully, with respect both for the reader and your sources.
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In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.
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The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.
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I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.
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