"We all carry a landscape within us." - Bruce Springsteen
The places that move us. . . To stand on the Antarctic Peninsula at midnight on summer solstice and look out over an infinitesimally small bit of the ice and rock and fringing ocean that comprise the continent, is to understand something of the vastness, beauty, and power of this Earth. The evocative force of this external Antarctic landscape matched something vital in my internal landscape, which is full of contradiction and complexity, light and dark, the wild and the sedate. This landscape is the essence of who I am, and I believe that happiness, to the extent that it is possible in this world, most often comes when we encounter the congruence between the better parts of our internal landscape and the landscapes of the great world, be they populated by people (family, friends, lovers) or penguins.
The natural landscapes that fascinate me most are harsh and unpredictable - exposed to the elements, hardscrabble, stripped bare and open to the sky and wind and sun, places in which it is possible to take the long view. For much of my life I have been drawn to the high mountains and arctic tundra, desert, and high plains., places where I have found, in the words of Gretel Ehrlich, the "solace of open spaces."