Lopez on love

My goal that day was intimacy — the tactile, olfactory, visual, and sonic details of what, to most people in my culture, would appear to be a wasteland. This simple technique of awareness had long been my way to open a conversation with any unfamiliar landscape. Who are you? I would ask. How do I say your name? May I sit down? Should I go now? Over the years I’d found this way of approaching whatever was new to me consistently useful: establish mutual trust, become vulnerable to the place, then hope for some reciprocity and perhaps even intimacy. You might choose to handle an encounter with a stranger you wanted to get to know better in the same way. - Barry Lopez

This comes from an article posted on Orion. And it led me to another piece by Lopez in the same online magazine:

What being a naturalist has come to mean to me, sitting my mornings and evenings by the river, hearing the clack of herons through the creak of swallows over the screams of osprey under the purl of fox sparrows, so far removed from White and Darwin and Leopold and even Carson, is this: Pay attention to the mystery. Apprentice to the best apprentices. Rediscover in nature your own biology. Write and speak with appreciation for all you have been gifted. Recognize that a politics with no biology, or a politics without field biology, or a political platform in which human biological requirements form but one plank, is a vision of the gates of Hell. - Barry Lopez

He writes about awe and enchantment; he writes about participation in the world as a loving practice of learning; he writes about the inevitable limitations of knowledge.

Every day, I watch and listen to one small bird. Every day. And what do I know of Tane? What did I know of Bobbit? What do I know of the cats who sleep in my bed and on my lap, who rouse me with yowls and paws, who soothe me with their warmth and their purrs? And, at the same time, how much more I know that I would if I denied the connections and encounters, if I quashed the love.