To contemplate the strangeness and wonder of these other ways of being is to begin to understand our place in the world very differently, to be reminded that we are not separate, or different, but part of a much larger system of impossible magnificence and complexity.

James Bradley, Deep Water

I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn't know what to do.
“Come here,” he said softly, and pulled me into his arms.

Bradley, The Ministry of Time

I turned back to him. As I adjusted to the dark, I could see he was staring upward.
“I can't manage it exactly without a sextant,” he said. “But I wanted to be able to orient myself.”
“So that, when the ice caps melt, you can sail to safer waters?”
“So that I will know where I was when I met you.”

Out of this mould, that might have come from the moon, or the interplanetary spaces, were growing mountain cranberries and blueberries, or huckleberries. We were soon so absorbed in gathering the latter that we were quite oblivious of the grandeurs about us.

John Burroughs. Signs and Seasons, 1886.

The enormous cleavage of the rocks, the appalling cracks and fissures, the rent bowlders, the smitten granite floors, gave one a new sense of the power of heat and frost. In one place we noticed several deep parallel grooves, made by the old glaciers.

But if each bird in his nocturnal passage were as luminous as a meteor, how the heavens would blaze during the migrating season, and how wonderful would seem their journeyings to and fro.

Orin Libby. The Nocturnal Flight of Migrating Birds, 1899. The Auk, Volume 16, Issue 2.

The great space of air above swarmed with life. Singly or in groups, large and small, or more seldom in a great throng the hurrying myriads pressed southward. It was a marvel and a mystery enacted under the cover of night, and of which only fugitive tidings reached the listeners below.

Forest floor (detail)

Straining after these tiny sensations, I nearly rolled off the world when I heard, and at the same time felt through my hips' and legs' bones on the ground, the bang and shudder of distant freight trains coupling.

Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974.

Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land—on the meadow and creek—one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?

I want to meet you in every place I ever loved.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This Is How You Lose the Time War, 2019.