from “Landscape and Narrative” by Barry Lopez

I think of two landscapes—one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see—not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution…..One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it—like that between the sparrow and the twig….

The second landscape I think of as an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape….the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as “mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order…..The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual is affected by land as it is by genes. Barry Lopez from his essay:

in Thoreau’s Journal:

1853:

5 A.M I hear the robin sing before I rise.

1856:

I am reassured and reminded that I am the heir of eternal inheritances which are inalienable, when I feel the warmth reflected from the sunny bank, and see the yellow sand and the reddish soil, and hear some dried leaves rustle and the trickling of melted snow in some sluiceway. The eternity which I detect in Nature I predicate of myself also. How many springs I have had this same experience! I am encouraged for I recognize this steady persistency and recovery of Nature as a quality of myself.

1853:

The frost in swamps and meadows makes it good waking there still.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The tapping of the wood pecker-rat-tat-tat-knocking at the door of some sluggish grub to tell him that the spring has arrived-&his fate.

This is one of the season sounds-calling the roll of birds & insects-the reveillee-

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Observed yesterday where a mass of ice in Walden of about an acre had cracked off from the main body and blown 30 or 40 rods crumbling up its edge against the Eastern shore.

Might not my Journal be called “Field Notes.”

in Thoreau’s Journal:
I notice the downy-swaddled plants now & in the fall, the fragrant life everlasting and the rib-wort-innocents born in a cloud.

Those algae I saw the other day in John Hosmers ditch were the most like seaweed than anything else I have seen in the country—- they made me look at the whole earth as a seashore. reminded me of Nereids-sea nymphs, triton-Proteus &c &c-made the ditches fabulate in an older than the arrowheaded character. Better learn this strange character which nature uses to day -than the Sanskrit-books in the brooks-

in Thoreau’s Journal:

By the river I see distinctly red-wings and hear their congueree. They are not associated with grackles. They are an age before their cousins, have attained to clearness and liquidity; they are officers, epauleted. The others are rank and file. I distinguish one even by its flight, hovering slowly from tree-top to tree-top, as if ready to utter its liquid notes. Their whistle is very clear and sharp, while that of the grackle is ragged and split.

It is a fine evening, as I stand on the bridge. The waters are quite smooth, very little ice to be seen. The red-wing and song-sparrow are singing, and a flock of tree-sparrows is pleasantly warbling. A new era has come. The red-wing’s gurgle-ee is heard where smooth waters begin. One or two boys are out trying their skiffs, even like the fuzzy gnats in the sun, and as often as one turns his boat round on the smooth surface, the setting sun is reflected from its side.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening, reminiscences of our sanest hours. The voice of nature is always encouraging.

When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round, and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue-scalloped rim. It is a spring landscape, and as impossible a fort-night ago as the song of birds.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring, but he will presently discover some evidence that vegetation had awaked some days at least before.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A new phase of the spring is presented, a new season has come. We no longer see dripping, saturated russet and brown banks through rain, hearing at intervals the alarm notes of early robins, banks which reflect a yellowish light, but we see the bare and now pale-brown and dry russet hills. The earth has cast off her white coat and come forth in her clean-washed, sober russet, early spring dress. As we look over the lively tossing blue waves for a mile or more eastward and westward our eyes fall on these shining russet hills….

The fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the hill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

May my melody not be wanting to the season.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

To see that which was lately so hard and immovable now so soft and impressible.

What if our moods could dissolve thus completely?

In Thoreau’s Journal:

The barren surfaces are perhaps the most interesting in such weather as yesterday, where the most terrene colors are seen.

The wet earth and sand, and especially subsoil, are very invigorating sights.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Memorable is the warm light of the spring sun on russet fields in the morning.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

On Tuesday, the 7th, I heard the first song-sparrow chirp, and saw it flit silently from alder to alder. This pleasant morning, after three days’ rain and mist, they generally burst forth into sprayey song from the low trees along the river.

The development of their song is gradual, but sure, like the expanding of a flower. This is the first song I have heard.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As I stand looking over the river, looking from the bridge into the flowing, eddying tide, the almost strange chocolate-colored water, the sound of distant crows and cocks is full of spring. As Anacreon says “the works of men shine,” so the sounds of men and birds are musical.

Something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air. At the end of winter there is a season in which we are daily expecting spring, and finally, a day when it arrives….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

At Corner Spring Brook the water reaches up to the crossing, and stands over the ice there, the brook being open and some space each side of it. When I look from forty to fifty rods off at the yellowish water covering the ice about a foot here, it is decidedly purple (through, when I am close by and looking down on it, it is yellowish merely),

while the water of the brook and channel, and a rod on each side of it, where there is no ice beneath, is a very beautiful dark blue. These colors are very distinct, the line of separation being the edge of the ice on the bottom; and this apparent juxtaposition of different kinds of water is a very singular and pleasing sight.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In the brooks the floating of small cakes of ice with various speed is full of content and promise, and when the water gurgles under a natural bridge you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an undertone.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Walking by the river this P.M., it being half open, and the waves running pretty high, the black waves, yellowish where they break over ice,

I inhale a fresh meadowy spring odor from them which is a little exciting. It is like the fragrance of tea to an old tea-drinker.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The river is frozen more solidly than during the past winter, and for the first time for a year I could cross it in most places.

I did not once cross it the past winter, though by choosing a safe place I might have done so without doubt once or twice. But I have had no river walks before.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I must not forget the lichen-painted boles of the beeches….

The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk.