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Book: The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
Quotes of Book: The Anthropology of Turquoise:
TOP TAGS :overcomingfleshlisteningsynchronicityenergyunforgettablerational-thoughtthings

  1. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for us to truly measure up to this land, for this land not to be a battlefield of anger and greed. When these two opposing conditions, elation and despair, follow one another too quickly, the universe seems careless and precipitate. I soar, I crash, a squall of heat let loose in the ethos.Or else I get hungry."
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  2. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country.
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  3. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding-maybe a little food-can set the world right. B
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  4. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico's flank. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. Like the ocean currents, airflow also moves in a circular pattern, captive to the earth's rotation, pulled one way or the other on either side of the equator: the Coriolis effect. This force can act upon the spiraling of water down drains, counterclockwise if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise if you are south of the equator. We are still in the Northern Hemisphere but just barely. My quest for drain behavior reassures me that we will not be flung off the spinning globe-you can never be too sure. On a flight to Australia once, when the airplane was precisely over the equator, I rushed to the airplane's lavatory and filled the sink with water. Then I pulled the plug to see which way the water would circle the drain, hoping for some sort of momentous turmoil in the physics of deflection. When you venture well beyond home, it is important to assess the territory.
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  5. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.
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  6. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.
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  7. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin.Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist's or a farmer's skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. Family reunions choke the social calendar. Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running "heritage quests." We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate.
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  8. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains... mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel...
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  9. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.
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  10. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also-more so-for beauty.
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  11. Ellen Meloy _ The Anthropology of Turquoise:

    Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home - not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
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