Sometimes I stumble across a paragraph or two in a book I'm reading that seem to say exactly what I think, only worded so much better that I could ever say. 

I read the following words the other day, and thought I'd pass them along because they say so beautifully what it is about the landscape that interests me, and why painting the landscape around me can be so energizing and refreshing:

"The forces of nature are huge, and we are tiny, and in the mountains it's easier to remember this.... I live in, or rather below, the mountains for two basic reasons: because I think the mountains are one of the last huge and wild and magnificent things we have left in this country, one of the last few things we have not yet, in places, grasped and squeezed and sculpted into some unrecognizable, and diminished, shape - a landscape, therefore, in which possibility still exists."

- Rick Bass, Why I Came West