#barrylopez

[jimfostercoc]

Barry Lopez, Editor of "Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape," talks about the interesting definition essay on the words 'lake' and 'desire path.' This full interview from a 2006 episode of "Conversations On The Coast with Jim Foster" can be heard now wherever you get your podcasts.

[kaggsy59]

"...to know and love what we have been given..." @NottingHillEds #barrylopez

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have a massive list (either mental or physical or possibly in several different places…) of books and authors you’d like to one day explore. For me, this does tend to change over the years, but a name I’ve wanted to read for some time is Barry Lopez. An essayist, nature and fiction writer, he was known for his strong environmental concerns; his “Arctic Dreams”…

[georgesboulevard]

[goodbearblind]

(Barry Lopez, Sogni Artici, citazione in epigrafe a "La felicità del lupo" di Paolo Cognetti) . . #paolocognetti #lafelicitàdellupo #barrylopez #sogniartici https://www.instagram.com/p/CWTLUooNaaS/?utm_medium=tumblr

[warpwoof]

Barry Lopez

Whether wolf and prey act according to some mutual understanding, or whether they only subconsciously participate in a fundamental drama, is something we shall probably never know. All we do know, staring up at the paintings of game animals on the cave walls at Lascaux, is that the belief that there was more to hunting than killing, and that dying was as sacred as living, was not something that just one day fell out of the sky.

[ffoffice]

Il grasso di balena che portava a bordo avrebbe reso tonnellate d’olio per illuminare i lampioni e lavorare la lana greggia delle filande. Nella stiva trasportava inoltre stecche di balena (fanoni) da usare per gli ombrelli e le veneziane, i recinti portatili per le pecore, le grate per le finestre e le molle per i divani. // E’ così sensibile che al contatto delle zampe d’un uccello una balena addormentata in superficie sussulta con violenza: è quasi impossibile immaginare quanto debba soffrire quando viene colpita da una fiocina che affonda nella carne.

[walaw717]

A Note to a World Struggling to Maintain its Ethics and Beauty.

In 2017 I took a long drive through the American west, and in the spring of that year drove along the Mackenzie River on the way home to New Mexico. I stopped on the road above BarryLopez's house and just allowed myself to know he might be home. It was enough to see the modesty he lived in and the beautiful place he wrote from.

Barry Lopez was famous for chronicling his travels to remote places and the landscapes he found there. But his writings weren't simply accounts of his journeys — they were reminders of how precious life on earth is, and of our responsibility to care for it. He died on Christmas Day following a years-long battle with prostate cancer

When Rose Friedman spoke to Lopez in his last year, he said he always sought to find grace in the middle of devastation.

She stated that in his studio, he had a collection of sticks, that bore the marks of little teeth. It was a lesson for Lopez. "Everyday I saw the signs of: don't lose faith in yourself," he told me.

Se also said, "When I met him at his home last year, he told me when he was feeling defeated by the work, he'd walk along the nearby McKenzie River.

""Every time I did there was a beaver stick in the water at my feet. And they're of course, they're workers. So I imagined the beaver were saying 'What the hell's wrong with you? You get back in there and do your work.'"

In September 2020, his writing room burned, and most of the forest around his home was gone. Three months later, he passed away on Christmas Day. They say he had a long illness, which is true, but I suspect he died of a broken heart. When we lose things, we deeply love the pain can kill us. I understand this because the road trip I was on in 2017 was to say goodbye to the west after I sold my small farm and gave my horses and tack to a friend. I was ill and brokenhearted from that loss for 6 years, even though I knew it was time to move on.

After I listened to his self-narrated autobiography, I developed mixed feelings about Barry Lopez. I did not find the poetry or lyricism in his writing voice I had come to love over the fifty years I read and re-read his books. He often, in his autobiography, came across as strident and condescending and, frankly, pretty judgemental and woke; there was none of the kindness or humility I found in his other books. For two years after hearing him in his own voice, I was not able to approach his work.

But we make a mistake in thinking that the author of anything actually shows up in their writing. In the renaissance, all writing was attributed to the muse and not the writer, and genius referred to the spirit that worked through you, not how smart you personally were - a much more humble way to see things. Understanding that I made peace and recently returned to his "genius's" wisdom.

I have been told by many of my more scientific friends they dislike Lopez. I think the dislike of Lopez has as much to do with their own materialism as it does with what he says.

Lopez was not a materialist; he was foremost a spiritualist and ethicist and spoke to that part of me (the counselor, the psychologist, and the healer) that is also grounded in ethics and the spiritual life. Both ethics and spirituality are about relationships, and only in relationships do we find healing.

Lopez always spoke about the loss of ethics in the industrial and commercial culture and how a lack of a moral worldview kills as fast as the materialist worldview we mistakenly call science. We forget that science is a method of asking questions and is rooted in the desire to understand a God we don't simply "believe" in but actually know. Materialism turns everything it sees into an object for our consumption, and in the end, as we consume, we become consumed.

My farm was in the middle of oil fracking country, and I saw firsthand that Materialists are like rapists - they use you, damage you, and really do not care because, in the end, they got what they wanted - more wealth and power. It is not just the oil industry that is materialist; however, our entire way of life is based upon materialism and acquisition, failing to see our relationship with the whole. Soon, we will extend that materialism to other planets.

We need people like Barry Lopez to remind us to live ethically and beautifully. We need people like him to remind us that the world is part of our personal story and that we are part of the whole and how we treat the world is, in the end, how we treat ourselves. He reminds us that we must see and live ethically to return the world we borrow from our great-great-great-grandchildren as good and healthy as we wound it, better if we understand that better is to heal the industrial consumerism of our own ancestors. What he gave me in his writing allows me to forgive the arrogance and stridency of his voice in his autobiography and to focus on the beauty we are destroying with every stroke of the pen of hedge fund parasites, politicians, and economists.

"While writing about the landscape often begins in the aesthetic, it must always tend to the ethical. I later realized that Lopez’s intense attentiveness was a form of moral gaze, born of his belief that if we attend more closely to something, then we are less likely to act selfishly towards it. " —Robert Macfarlane.

Below is a picture of the room from which he wrote to us so beautifully.

Read his books; they are beautiful in a world that is struggling to maintain its ethics and beauty.

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[chrisengel]

In my experience traveling with indigenous people, nobody says much of anything while they’re on the move. Because language collapses experience into meaning, and if you do it too soon, you’ve lost all the other meaning that would’ve been there. BarryLopez

[andydduncan]

"And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there." #ArcticDreams #BarryLopez #quotes

[oneswithfunes]

"it should only be to say, as well as one can, how wonderfully all this fits together" #barrylopez #ice #warmth

[katryanv]

“Everything is held together with stories...” Barry Lopez Grove Library. #stories #heldtogether #compassion #barrylopez (at Perth, Western Australia)

[emraguso]

Tea and #barrylopez #reading #sunday #perfect #weekend

[mindsplushearts]

Signed copy of Arctic Dreams, a book by the visionary naturalist Barry Lopez, an author that moves me to dive into wilderness and open my eyes.

[unfoldingnarratives]

We are pattern makers, and if our patterns are beautiful and full of grace, they will be able to bring a person for whom the world has become broken and disorganised up off his knees and back to life #barrylopez #patterns #bougainvillea

[grnpnsth-blog]

Few perceived the extent or significance of the destruction of the aboriginal sites that took place during tank maneuvers and bombing runs or in the laying out of highways, railroads, mining districts, and irrigated fields.

- Barry Lopez (The Stone Horse, 1986)

[komical-blog]

@_callieflower #tbt #awz #BarryLopez