“The Chinese artistic tradition known as shan-shui or ‘rivers-and-mountains,’ originated in the early fifth century BC, and endured for two thousand years. Its practitioners were usually wanderers or self-exiles who lived in the mountain lands of China, and wrote about the wild world around them. Their art sought to articulate the wondrous process of the world, its continuous coming-into-being. To this quality of aliveness, the shan-shui artists gave the name zi-ran, which might be translated as ‘self-ablazeness,’ ‘self-thusness,’ or ‘wildness.’

Pilgrims and walkers, they explored their mountains in what they called the ‘dragon-suns’ of summer, in the long winds of winter and the blossom storms of late spring. They wrote of the cool mist that settled into valleys at dawn, of bamboo groves into which green light fell, and of how thousands of snowy egrets would take off from lakes like lifting blizzards. They observed the way winter light fell upon drifted snow, and how shadows hung from cold branches, and wrote that such sights moved them to a ‘bright clear joy.’ Night was especially marvelous to them, because of the clean luminous presence of the moon, and its ability to silver the world into strangeness.”

— Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places