Catching up on @dwalbert’s “Road to Jockey’s Ridge” this morning. Loved this from “The Changeable Woods":
I walked the same acre of woods every day for seven years, and a trail by a river almost every week for about that long, and the light of each discovery was, like the stars in the sky, one more pinprick in the vast darkness of my ignorance. I learned enough to feel my way along familiar paths; I had an idea what to expect and when to expect it, but I was often enough surprised. And that was one place. Give me a different forest on a given day, say spruce pine forest on a mountainside in early June, and it’s just a pretty picture again. Having come to know one place over months and years, you may at least sense the changeability of another, merely in passing, even if you don’t understand it. You know, at least, that the snapshot is only a snapshot. You know enough to wonder. But even to know that much requires sustained attention.