Turkey Vultures — Image by kenne
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture:
No one envies him; he harms nobody;
and he contemplates our little world
from a most serene and noble height.
Archive for the ‘Edward Abbey’ Category
Turkey Vultures Migrating South Leave a comment
Sabino Canyon Morning 1 comment
Sabino Canyon Morning — Image by kenne
“What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.”
— Edward Abbey
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Tucson Rodeo 1 comment
Tucson Rodeo (02/15/14) — Image by kenne
“Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”
―
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Cristate Saguaro Cactus 4 comments
Cristate Saguaro Cactus in Sabino Canyon — Image by kenne
The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
— Edward Abbey
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Songs With The Word ‘Tucson’ In Them Leave a comment
Yesterday the Arizona Daily Star published an article titled “31 songs that have the word ‘Tucson’ in them.” Of course, it go my attention
so I read the article figuring that one of my favorite singer-songwriters would be included in the 31 songs, Tom Russell, who penned
The Ballad of Edward Abbey — he was not. I guess the list was not intended to be comprehensive.
It was in the town of Tucson in Nineteen Eighty-Three
A man named Edward Abbey come a walking up to me
He pulled his cigar from his mouth, said, «I smell lawyers here»
The politician, running-dogs, they crawled away in fear
Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Ed walked across the desert at least a thousand times
He spoke with javelina, slept ‘neath piñon pine
And if he saw a billboard there, he’d chop that bastard down
Said, if a man can’t piss in his own front yard, he’d never keep close to town
Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Lord, I wish Edward Abbey were walking round today
Ed had a taste for women, in fact he married quite a few
He said, «I’d fall in love, boys, but I’m only passing through
You know I like ’em all, boys, and some more than the rest
I’ve tried my hand at monogamy, now I’m off to save the west
Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Ed died one day at sundown in his Tucson riding shack
They wrapped him in a sleeping bag and drove him way out back
Beneath the wild saguaro, the coyotes chewed his bones
And on a hidden marker, was ‘No Comment’, carved in stone
Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Yeah, I wish Edward Abbey were walking round today
Now I’m living in the desert, but the town is a-closing in
Those cracker box developments, Ed would call a sin
We stole this land from the Mexican and now we’ll sell it back
And they’ll live like mortgage prisoners in those goddamn housing tracts
Tell me, who votes for the mountain lion, tell me, who votes for the fox
Who votes for the spotted owl who hides there in the rocks
I wish that Ed would come again with a chainsaw in his hand
And carve all up those housing tracts and take on back the land
Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Yeah, I wish Edward Abbey were walking round today
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Tucson Folk Festival Leave a comment
Tucson Folk Festival (2013) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
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Desert Landscape Leave a comment
Desert Landscape — Image by kenne
“Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert,
the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild
and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the anti-human, that other world
which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse – its implacable indifference.”
― Edward Abbey
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Benedicto 1 comment
Snow On The Peaks Above Sabino Canyon — Image by
We are blessed to live on this beautiful planet.
Yet, most people don’t show any gratitude.
Benedicto
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous,
leading to the most amazing view.
May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets’ towers
into a dark primeval forest
where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps
and down into a desert of red rock,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than
your deepest dreams waits for you–
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
– Edward Abbey
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Corral Fence Line Art 1 comment
Corral Fence Line — Photo-Artistry by kenne
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader,
a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight
for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.”
— Edward Abbey
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Lupine In The Desert 1 comment
Lupine In The Desert — Photo-Artistry by kenne
“I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.”
— Edward Abbey
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Canyonlands National Park In B&W Leave a comment
Canyonlands National Park — Image by kenne
“We cannot entrust the management of our lives
to kings, priests, politicians, county commissioners.”
— from A Voice Crying In The Wilderness by Edward Abbey
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Cape Hatteras Light Station 1 comment
Cape Hatteras Light Station (04/08/07) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
“While rises in the west the coastwise range,
slowly the hushed land —
Combustion at the astral core — the dorsal change
Of energy — convulsive shift of sand …
But we, who round the capes, the promontories
Where strange tongues vary messages of surf
Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars
The ancient names — return home to our own
Hearths, there to eat an apple and recall
The songs that gypsies dealt us at Marseille
Or how the priests walked — slowly through Bombay —
Or to read you, Walt, — knowing us in thrall”
— from 4. Cape Hatteras by Hart Crane
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Sonoran Skyway –Edward Abbey Leave a comment
Sonoran Sky Island — Images by kenne
“I feel again the poignant urge to grasp it, embrace it, know all
at once and all in all; but the harder I strive for such a consummation,
the more elusive that it becomes, slipping like a dream through my
arms. Can this desire be satisfied only in death? Something in our
human consciousness seems to make us forever spectators of
the world we live in.
Maybe some of my crackpot, occultist friends are right; maybe we
really are aliens here on earth, our spirits born on some other,
simpler, more human planet. But why were we sent here?
What is our mission, comrades, and when do we get paid?
A writer’s epitaph: He fell in love with the planted earth,
but the affair was never consummated.”
— Edward Abbey
“To the consternation of the “committed” reviewer, he is not a
conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable list of any other
kind; he keeps on showing up as Edward Abbey, a horse of another
color, and one that requires some care to appreciate.”
— from “A Few Words in Favor of Ed Abbey” by Wendell Berry
Sonoran Desert Eye
“He had the zeal of a true believer and the sting of a scorpion.”
— Wallace Stegner referring to Edward Abbey
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Wilderness of Rocks In Pusch Ridge Wilderness Leave a comment
Wilderness of Rocks In Pusch Ridge Wilderness — Images by kenne
Words by: Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
John Muir, and Wallace Stegner
Wilderness Floor
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Painted Desert — B&W Photo 6 comments
Painted Desert– B&W Image by kenne
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives
as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild,
the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of
civilization itself.”
― from Desert Solitaire by
