landscapes

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.

We saw beautiful landscapes on the journey.

There is a beautiful village in every country.

To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive. Certainly, it requires strength and perseverance to get to windward of problems, but there is no greater delight than to reach new shores, and even to sail, as Camoëns says, __hrough seas that keel has never cut before._ If you will now open a bank-account of attention for me, I foretell sun-smitten landscapes and promise archipelagoes.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

As long as we dare dream, we can occupy new land.

We encountered beautiful souls on the travel path.

I love to photograph the gorgeous landscapes when I travel.

To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.

Water is always working, reorganizing the land.

The undulating terrain was cloaked in lush abundance, the vineyards like garlands of deep green and yellow, orchards and farms sprouting here and there, hillocks of dry golden grass crowned by beautiful sun-gilt houses, barns and silos. And overhead was the bluest sky she'd ever seen, as bright and hard polished as marble.There was something about the landscape that caught at her emotions. It was both lush and intimidating, its beauty so abundant. Far from the bustle of the city, she was a complete stranger here, like Dorothy stepping out of her whirling house into the land of Oz. Farm stands overflowing with local produce marked the long driveways into farms with whimsical names- Almost Paradise, One Bad Apple, Toad Hollow. Boxes and bushels were displayed on long, weathered tables. Between the farms, brushy tangles of berries and towering old oak trees lined the roadway.

Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.

We experience new culture with every journey.

They were full of mysteries and secrets, like... like poems turned into landscapes.""'Poems turned into landscapes.'" he murmured with a slight smile. "And what of Vestenveld's gardens? Do you see poems in them?""Your gardens are like your country's poetry. Very frilly and organized.