To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

Barbara Hurd, from Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Beacon Press, 2001)

Via A Poet Reflects

(via imhavingacrisis)

winterlief:

“There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
(…)
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.”

— Mary Oliver, from A Dream Of Trees in “New And Selected Poems: Volume One” (via adrasteiax)