Pianissimo (Yosemite)

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. -Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Chasing Light (French Alps)

Swift rush the spectral vapours white Past limestone scars with ragged pines, Showing--then blotting from our sight!-- Halt--through the cloud-drift something shines! -Matthew Arnold, Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, 1824

Revelation (King's Canyon)

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. -John Muir

Radiance (Sierra)

The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony. -Ruth Bernhard

Rays of Life (North Cascades)

Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set, A light to lighten as from living eyes The cold unlit close lids of one that lies Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies To fire us living lest our lives forget. -In the Bay, 1878

Splitting the Shroud (near Reno)

Sky -- what a scowl of cloud     Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud:     Splendid, a star! -Robert Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, 1878

Discovery (French Alps)

Ev'n Light itself, which every thing displays, Shone undiscover'd, till his brighter mind Untwisted all the shining robe of day; And, from the whitening undistinguish'd blaze, Collecting every ray into his kind, -James Thomson, A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, 1727

Behind the Clouds (Baja)

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day, 1841

Living Air (SF Bay)

For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue.--And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things -William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798

Living Fire (SF Bay)

Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set, A light to lighten as from living eyes The cold unlit close lids of one that lies Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies To fire us living lest our lives forget. -Algernon Charles Swinburne, In the Bay, 1878

Passion Kindled (Utah)

And beauty, all concentrating like rays Into one focus, kindled from above; -George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan: Canto the Second, 1819