You know – my fascination for the Arctic is bottomless, so it might not come as a surprise that I’m deeply in love with Barry Lopez‘s wonderful book Arctic Dreams. I read it like a sacred text, word by word, paragraph by paragraph. Someone said: Lopez writes about the visible world with the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet – it is so very true.

In the following lines Lopez is writing about snow gees by the Klamath Basin, how he fell asleep to the sound of their night flying:

I felt a calmness birds can bring to people; and, quieted, I sensed here the outlines of the oldest mysteries: the nature and the extent of space, the fall of light from the heavens, the pooling of time in the present, as if it were water