• february one
  

  As cheap and ubiquitous as they are onions are not easy to grow, at least not organically, so I didn’t want to waste one. I have shed more tears over growing onions than I ever have from eating them.

  Andy Griffin (via The Ladybug Letter)

• february two
  

  Do not let your peace depend on the hearts of others; whatever they say about you, good or bad, you are not because of it another, for as you are, you are.

  Thomas a Kempis

• february three
  

  There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

  Rachel Carson

• february four
  

  The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.

  Wendell Berry (b.1934)

• february five
  

  I read the landscape to help me through, to know what’s come before me there, to find my footing in time. The land can speak us back to ourselves, a kind of autobiography. To see it as mere scenery is like looking at the closed cover of a book.

  Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place (via Lifescapes: Snow scene)

• february six
  

  Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.

  Francis Bacon, Sr. (1561-1626) English Lawyer and Philosopher (via Appalachian Treks: carpe diem)

• february seven
  

  Blow of an axe,
  pine scent,
  the winter woods.

  Buson

• february eight
  

  Why should conservationists have a positive interest in…farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

  Wendell Berry, “Conservationist and Agrarian,” 2002
  via Michael Pollan.

• february nine
  

  When it blows,
  The mountain wind is boisterous,
  But when it blows not,
  It simply blows not.

  Emily Bronte

• february ten
  

  Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the common- place unusual.

  Edward Weston (American Photographer, 1886-1958) via The Great American Landscape

• february eleven
  

  “All there is, is fragments, because a man, even the loneliest of the species, is divided among several persons, animals, worlds. To know a man more than slightly it would be necessary to gather him together from all those quarters, each last scrap of him, and this done after he is safely dead.”

  ― Coleman Dowell, Island People

• february twelve

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

 – Seneca, Redtree Times – Dare