quoting SRS

I think, perhaps, I should have been born his daughter. Or niece. Or neighbor. Yes, neighbor, that would do.

"Meanwhile my eyes are also feasting. That is a favorite saying of my mother's: Something-or-other is a feast for the eyes. Like most proverbial sayings, it has been worn slick by too many tongues; and this is because, like most sayings, it names a truth. The truth here is one the mountain reminds me of: I have a hunger for nonhuman spaces, not out of any distaste for humanity, but out of a need to experience my humanness the more vividly by confronting stretches of the earth that my kind has had no part in making. I feast atop Mount June, on a jonathan apple, on vision."

--from "Feasting on Mountains" by Scott Russell Sanders.

This is how I feel when I'm in the mountains. This is why I crave it. I crave the silence, the big. I love the city (Chicago) because of the energy and beauty of water amid metal and glass. Man-made H&M and all those other shops and buildings, I love and wonder at. I feel there; I feel confidence and the power of doing. But I cannot feel awe and true power and understanding except in the nothing of man. The mountains, the true earth, that is home. Mountains and water running down hill, all down and life and the living of souls. My soul. Whatever soul I have is not in any city but sunlit sides of hills and mountains and over and under green.