I have always loved a window, especially an open one.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a fondness for open windows, symbolizing openness to the world and nature.
Wendell Berry's quote reflects an appreciation for the beauty and freshness that comes with an open window. It signifies a desire for connection with the outside world and suggests that an open window can bring in not just air and light, but also a sense of possibility and inspiration. This love for open windows often translates to a broader love for nature and the comforts it brings, as well as an invitation to embrace the life that exists beyond our immediate surroundings.
In practice
This quote can be used during a nature retreat to emphasize the importance of openness to natural experiences.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.
You have a whole life in the outdoors, you realize you have a sense of responsibility to protect these wild places.
For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.
I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.