Sand Leaves and Plant Feathers

Thoreau, seeing sand formations resembling leaves, became interested in the possibility of a transcendent connection between inorganic and organic nature. A living theory of forms. I felt much the same way today admiring beds of moss, vivid green in the low light and thin rain, some of the outgrowths looking for all the world like plant feathers, or looking closer, like tiny knitted ferns.

"That sand foliage! It convinces me that Nature is still in her youth, —that florid fact about which mythology merely mutters,—that the very soil can fabulate as well as you or I. It stretches forth its baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring forth from its bald brow. There is nothing inorganic. This earth is not, then, a mere fragment of dead history, strata upon strata, like the leaves of a book, an object for a museum and an antiquarian, but living poetry, like the leaves of a tree,—not a fossil earth. but a living specimen."
– Henry David Thoreau, from Journals, February 5, 1854

Posted on March 26, 2017 02:09 AM by