As fog moved to the mainland I heard a flock of birds fly over. They sounded like a dress rustling, a dress… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite… — Gretel Ehrlich Appetite Copy Share Image
“Doctoring sick calves becomes my sole work. I don’t even notice when or where the new ones were born. My days and… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
Turbulence, like many forms of trouble, cannot always be seen. We bounce so hard my arms sail helplessly above my head. In… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
“Now what looks like smoke is only mare’s tails—clouds streaming—and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body… — Gretel Ehrlich Body Copy Share Image
How odd it is that sewing is thought to be 'women's work' when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
“I hold the Big Ben clock taken from a dead sheepherder’s wagon. The clock measures intervals of time, not the speed of… — Gretel Ehrlich Cause and effect Copy Share Image
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
“Space is an arena where the rowdy particles that are the building blocks of life perform their antics. All spring, things fall;… — Gretel Ehrlich Building blocks Copy Share Image
“A sense of panic ensued, but panic is like fresh air. The world falls out from under us and we fly, we… — Gretel Ehrlich Anxiety Copy Share Image
“Lately I’ve had to redefine the word “knowledge” to a knowledge that cannot know anything. I’m dealing not in careless absurdities here… — Gretel Ehrlich Despair Copy Share Image
“The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather… — Gretel Ehrlich Art Copy Share Image
We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have… — Gretel Ehrlich Artist Copy Share Image
“Some days I think this one place isn’t enough. That’s when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and… — Gretel Ehrlich Life Copy Share Image
It's no wonder human beings are so narcissistic. The way our ears are constructed, we can hear only what is right next… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is… — Gretel Ehrlich Autumn Copy Share Image
The retreat and disappearance of glaciers—there are only 160,000 left—means we're burning libraries and damaging the planet, possibly beyond repair. Bit by… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and… — Gretel Ehrlich Animal Copy Share Image
Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans,… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous,… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes,… — Gretel Ehrlich Contemplative Copy Share Image
Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
Thirty years ago, my sister, Gale (so named because a gale hit Boston Harbor the night she was born), some friends and… — Gretel Ehrlich Copy Share Image
From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans… — Gretel Ehrlich Ability Copy Share Image
History is not truth versus falsehoods, but a mixture of both, a mélange of tendencies, reactions, dreams, errors, and power plays. What's… — Gretel Ehrlich Discipline Copy Share Image
“I felt light and heavy at the same time. I wondered if the itako we visited had really talked to my dead… — Gretel Ehrlich Friendship Copy Share Image
