Ellen Meloy
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Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
Ellen Meloy
An inspired reflection on the bond between wild creatures and the human imagination, told as a chronicle of four seasons with a band of rare desert bighorn sheep.
Among the steep cliffs of Utah’s canyonlands a band of rare desert bighorn sheep simply vanished. Although the word “extinct” was bandied about, their passing seemed to fit the downward spiral of native wildlife in the Southwest that began in the early twentieth century. Remote, isolated, and elusive, this band slipped through the cracks. The bighorns were gone. Then they came back.
We have…
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit
Ellen Meloy
Neurobiologists say that our sensitivity to color begins when we are infants. For artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy, who has spent most of her life in wild, remote places, an intoxication with light and color—sometimes subliminal, often fierce—has expressed itself as a profound attachment to landscape. It has been rightly said: Color is the first principle of Place.
In this luminous mix of memoir, natural history, and eccentric adventure, Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—as a metaphor for a way to make sense of the world from the clues of nature. We journey with Meloy through diverse habitats of supersensual light, through places of beauty and places of desecration. Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the environments, creatures, and objects that celebrate what we often take for granted: “our own spirits, the eternity of all things.”
