an excerpt

Posted on October 20, 2004 by

2 Comments


On a planet of water the land has to end, and here in the West of North America it ends in prodigal beauty. It ends in mountains plunging to sounds and fjords, in the thunder of calving glaciers, in still forests of the tallest trees on Earth. It ends in rocky stacks haunted by sea lions and gulls, in great waves of sand flowing slowly inland, in heights and dark headlands looming in mist. It ends in covers and strands and bare desert hills, in warm lagoons where gray whales sport and birth their young. And always the land ends in ceaseless barter with wind and waves, in the surge and boom of one of the first musics the planet learned how to make.

…………………………………………..John Daniel from The Limits of Paradise

Category: Non Sequiturs

2 Comments on “an excerpt”

  1. ah, beautiful… so beautiful.

    i look outside and today it is a pretty fall day in the hills of missouri. raining and the leaves are falling everywhere. not so amazing as your quote above, but sweet nonetheless.

  2. yeah – john daniels is a very poetic writer, and that paragraph really stood out to me as evoking the coast on which i have lived all my life. unfortunately the essay the limits of paradise is about what horrid things we have done to this beautiful coast and its once-majestic forests. here are the borders of our shangri-la and they are difficult to gaze upon unbroken.

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