Gretel Ehrlich - The Solace of Open Spaces (1985)

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The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.

Gretel Ehrlich
True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.

Gretel Ehrlich
Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Gretel Ehrlich
We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough.... We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

Gretel Ehrlich
There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

Gretel Ehrlich
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

Gretel Ehrlich
All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"—an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.

Gretel Ehrlich
Ritual — which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth — goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.

Gretel Ehrlich
I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

Gretel Ehrlich
Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

Gretel Ehrlich
Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

Gretel Ehrlich
If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.

Gretel Ehrlich
We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least — a fear of 'dry spells,' dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize.

Gretel Ehrlich
Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Gretel Ehrlich
We forget that our sun is only a star destined to someday burn out. The time scale of its transience so far exceeds our human one that our unconditional dependence on its life-giving properties feels oddly like an indiscretion we'd rather forget.

Gretel Ehrlich