Visiting friends ask the difference between a butte and a mesa, a bluff and a rim, a wash and a creek, a dune and a blowout, a canyon, a gulch, a coulee and a draw - the vernacular that braids people and places. Thinking about the reciprocity between landscape and language brings some favorite quotations to mind:
Gretel Ehrlich: “The poet Seamus Heaney said that landscape is sacramental, to be read as text. Earth is instinct: perfect, irrational, semiotic.”
Robert Smithson: "All language is an alphabet of sites."
