John Steinbeck, an early ecologist...

“Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

– Sea of Cortez, p.178

"Don't you remember what night it is?" he asked. "No. What is it?" "It is St Andrew's Eve..."

...Then the Portagee knew; for this was the night when every paisano who wasn't in jail wandered restlessly through the forest.  This was the night when all buried treasure sent up a faint phosphoresent glow through the ground.  There was plenty of treasure in the woods, too...

- John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

Iron & Wine, Jesus the Mexican Boy

Pilon was a lover of beauty and a mystic. He raised his face into the sky and his soul arose out of him into the sun's afterglow...

...That not too perfect Pilon, who plotted and fought, who drank and cursed, trudged slowly on; but a wistful and shining Pilon went up to the seagulls where they bathed on sensitive wings in the evening.  That Pilon was beautiful, and his thoughts were unstained with selfishness and lust.  And his thoughts are good to know...

- John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

It was purple dusk, that sweet time when the day's sleeping is over, and the evening of pleasure and conversation has not begun...

...The pine trees were very black against the sky, and all objects on the ground were obscured with dark; but the sky was as mournfully bright as memory.  The gulls flew lazily home to the sea rocks after a day's visit to the fish canaries of Monterey...

- John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

1920's Cigar Box Blues