An unknown species flies across the moon during nocturnal migration. “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, 1899.
The world still hums with beauty and astonishment. We share the planet with whales that sing across oceans and navigate by watching the stars, with fish that pass ways of knowing across generations, with turtles that follow invisible patterns of magnetism back to the beaches where they were born.
Pine trees in shades of green were shimmering in the cool morning wind. Overhead the sky was gray but bright, and low clouds moved steadily across it, sailing on the sea of wind. Everything, it seemed, was moving. Gareth Brown. The Book of Doors, 2024.
When we reached the field, it was a line of darkness scrawled on the deeper darkness. We stumped our bikes over the wet, breathless earth. “There,” he said. “Hmm?” “Stars.” I blinked at him, and then I looked up. It was true. In the fresh March night, the sky was full of stars.
The rock had that gray, elemental, eternal look which granite alone has. One seemed to be face to face with the gods of the fore-world. Like an atom, like a breath of to-day, we were suddenly confronted by abysmal geologic time,— the eternities past and the eternities to come.
A Cape May Warbler inspects the underside of an oak leaf.
The air seemed fairly alive with invisible birds as the calls rang out, now sharply and near at hand, and now faintly and far away. Almost human many of them seemed, and it was not difficult to imagine that they expressed a whole range of emotions from anxiety and fear up to good-fellowship and joy.
Is there anything more moving than awaking to wonders that you have been wandering among all your life unaware? Is there anything more hopeful than realizing that you've always been surrounded by sublime scenes? Leigh Ann Henion. Night Magic, 2024.
I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world's coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides: I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in my lungs?
I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.
There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?
Is the sky singing? Is the moon singing? Did a dragonfly drink nectar, climb into the clouds and make music? Has thunder suddenly decided to turn melodious? In the flood of the sky, mixing its flood of joy, I stood watching the skylark swimming, singing.
The first time I ever recorded the songs of humpback whales at night was off Bermuda. It was also the first time I had ever heard the abyss. Normally you don't hear the size of the ocean when you are listening, but I heard it that night.
And we were friends now, somehow — as she must have known we would be all along. Alice looked at me with her splendid, wise eyes . . . choosing. Stephenie Meyer. Twilight, 2005.
When the folks first left, and the evening came, the hunting cats slouched in from the fields and mewed on the porch. And when no one came out, the cats crept through the open doors and walked mewing through the empty rooms. And then they went back to the fields and were wild cats from then on.
When laughing children chase after fireflies, they are not pursuing beetles but catching wonder. When wonder matures, it peels back experience to seek deeper layers of marvel below. This is science’s highest purpose. The Forest Unseen. David George Haskell, 2012.
The wind’s force has yet to die down. It surges across the forest in pulses, setting the trees into violent motion. The canopy protests with a loud hiss, the sound of millions of pummeled leaves. The Forest Unseen. David George Haskell, 2012.
Although it is well past dawn, the sky is dark and casts a dim light that deepens the wetness. The damp air oozes around the mandala, merging sky and forest. The leaf litter seems to have no upper surface; the rotting leaves simply bleed upward and turn into dark wet air. The Forest Unseen, Haskell
The sky was an eddy of molten amethyst, sapphire, and ruby, all bleeding into a final pool of onyx. I wanted to swim in it, wanted to bathe in its colors and feel the stars twinkling between my fingers. Sarah J. Maas. A Court of Thorns and Roses, 2015.
