physical-geography

"Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day, I sit in solitude and only hear Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay, The lost intensities of hope and fear; In those old marshes yet the rifles lie."

"Where there was a marsh then in Unug, it was full of water. Where there was any dry land, Euphrates poplars grew there. Where there were reed thickets, old reeds and young reeds grew there."

"In the great marshes and the wide lagoons, I am your persecuting demon."

"Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-with-holding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!"

"Enki knit together the marshlands, making young and old reeds grow there; he made birds and fish teem in the pools and lagoons"

"The sand (Hindi: mitti) in the arena is especially holy to them. In Benares it [sand] comes from the Ganges and is mixed with Ganges water, mustard oil, and turmeric in order to keep it soft and supple. On special occasions, milk and clarified butter (ghi) are also added. The ground must be turned, loosened, and renewed periodically. Only the master (Hindi:ustad) is allowed to enter the new sand after he has honoured it with flowers and incense. The young men not only rub themselves with sand, they also wallow in it. Sand is the balm for their heroism."

"There are countless sand collectors around the world, and there have been for a long time. …Sand collectors call themselves as arenophiles or “sand lovers”- a mixture of Latin and Greek. The word arena derives from the ancient Roman habit of covering the ground in amphitheaters with sand (harena or arena in Latin) – to soak up blood. The pure Greek would be psammophile, and some sand collectors use this but it is commonly used also to describe plants and creatures that are sand-loving, forging a livelihood among the grains."

"...the entire universe was there within a grain for our understanding."

"The sand grain has become a symbol of permanence and fragility of our – and - nature’s works."

"It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out – it is the grain of sand in your shoe."

"Sand is somewhat like beauty – we know it when we see it, or touch it, but it seems difficult to describe."

"It has been estimated that on the order of a billion sand grains are born around the world every second."

"The birth of a sand grain is a microscopic event, a flap of butterfly’s wings heralding greater change and a larger creation. Each grain carries the equivalent of the DNA of its parents and develops a character through its life and is moulded partly by its environment. Compared to the scale of a human life, however, the sand grains’ story is never ending, and rebirth is a regular event."

"Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe."

"Every grain of sand is a jewel waiting to be discovered. ... When we walk along a beach, we tread upon millions of years of biological and geological history."

"And so castle made of sand fall into the sea, eventually."

"For nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding economy working up all that is wasted to-day in to to-marrows creation;not a superfluous grain of sand for all ostentation she makes of expense and public works."

"History is a child building a sand castle by the sea and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world."

"You may smile at the fanciful structures I rear, And say, that my castles are built but on sand ; Like bubbles, that on the blue waters appear, That sparkle, invite, and then sink from the hand."

"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it."

"I don't like sand. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere."

"Close to 70 percent of all sand grains on the earth are made of quartz."

"Sand grains comes in variety of shapes, which can make measuring its size quite tricky."

"Reflecting its potential fluidity and fickleness, sand, as the quintessential granular material, has become a symbol of instability and impermanence. The biblical admonition against building a house on sand may be exaggerated."

"...the noise made by a single grain of sand moving with the waves is one of a series of tiny perceptions that we accumulate to hear the roar of the ocean."

"There are as many stars in the universe as all the grains of sand in the beaches of the world."

"If you speak ill of another do not speak it...write it in the sand near the water’s edge."

"The sand grain is anonymous, waiting for rain and wind to sweep it away on an endless journey, to demonstrate its durability while its weaker companions fall by the way side. But it is called sand not because of what it is made of or its origins, bit because of how big it is."

"For Look! Within my hallow hand, While round the earth careens, I hold a single grain of sand And wonder what it means. Ah! If I had the eyes to see, And brain to understand, I think the Life’s mystery might be Solved in the grain of sand."

"The crust of a tan man imbibed by the sand; soaking up the thirst of the land."

"And it stood still upon the sand of the sea. And I saw a wild beast ascending out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, and upon its horns ten diadems, but upon its heads blasphemous names. Now the wild beast that I saw was like a leopard, but its feet were as those of a bear, and its mouth was as a lion’s mouth. And the dragon gave to [the beast] its power and its throne and great authority."

"A single grain of sand can have an influence far out of proportion to its size, but when it gathers together with vast numbers of its colleagues, very strange things can indeed happen."

"To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower."

"The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust."

"The huge variety of sand grains is astounding, and each one has a story to tell."

"Examining sand grains through the microscope is a wonderful way to find out about the biology, and ecology of the local environment."

"A wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe."

"Unhappy they who raise their hopes upon the shifting sand."

"Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand?"

"I wrote my name upon the sand; I thought I wrote it on thine heart. I had no touch of fear, that words, Such words, so graven, could depart."

"The desert, like every landscape, had its own persona. It was a situation of white glare by day, white glare glimmering from the sands up into the atmosphere. Beneath, faintly showed the contours of the dunes as if through mist or water. Above, a flat coppery sky rested on the framework of the glare. Sometimes a formation of rock came swimming out of the glare like a great thorn-backed fish; items at a distance were of a tindery brittle blueness unlike the fluid blueness of a watered country. The heat of the desert was not like a heat, but like a whittling away. There seem to sound in the desert, a high-pitched whistling, but there was no sound save the furnace wind raising the sand like smoke from the ridges, as if the dunes actually burned. The word of the desert was this: I am made from all the dusts of the bones of men who have perished here, and my rocks are monuments to mountains I have ground away. There were no green places, no springs. To this desert, such as these were wounds which it had healed with aridity. What it could not eradicate, it buried. By night the sand chilled. Frost scaled its surfaces so it shone with a pure black shining. It was beautiful as only such a spot could be beautiful—because it had warped the natural laws, and here it told you the hideous was fair. And was believed."

"The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen."

"The fate of North American Indian tribes frequently resembled that of the Australian Aborigines. European settlers arrived on their native territories and claimed the land for their own. When the Indians resisted, the settlers, supported by their colonial governments, or their national, state, and local governments, were quick to drive out or kill the Indians and their families or to force them onto reservations to live out their lives in alien surroundings. As in the case of the Aborigines, children were taken from Indian families, women were kidnapped and raped, promises of peace were made and broken, and claims of racial and civilizational superiority were used by the settlers to justify their land grabbing and their killing. North American native peoples, like the Aborigines, were highly susceptible to the diseases brought to their homelands by the settlers and prone to the abuse of alcohol, which the settlers purposely employed to undermine their ability to resist. Those settlers who raised livestock, primarily cows and sheep, tended to have the sharpest conlicts with the Indians, provoking massacres and outright warfare between Indian tribes and government and militia formations. The tendency of the North American settlers to see the Indians as hopelessly primitive and incapable of marshaling the resources of the land gave them “reason” to deprive those Indians of the most desirable lands and territories."

"Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables. This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being."

"Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man."

"It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart."

"After millennia of Native history, and centuries of displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties. Even so, Native Nations, communities, families, and individuals today sustain their sense of belonging to ancestral homelands and protect these connections through Indigenous languages, oral traditions, ceremonies, and other forms of cultural expression."

"The wilderness and the parched land will exult, and the desert plain will be joyful and blossom as the saffron. Without fail it will blossom; it will rejoice and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and of Sharon. They will see the glory of Jehovah, the splendor of our God. At that time the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. At that time the lame will leap like the deer, and the tongue of the speechless will shout for joy. For waters will burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert plain. The heat-parched ground will become a reedy pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water. In the lairs where jackals rested, there will be green grass and reeds and papyrus."

"Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert."

"The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old."