Tagged: nature
“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“Wherever you are: some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well. Enormous space is near.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“I have just returned from a walk alone, a walk so wonderful that I feel like reducing it to a universal rule, that all people ought to take a walk every evening all alone,…and that during this entire walk they ought to talk with God,…and let God do most of the talking.” – Frank Laubach, Letters by a Modern Mystic
Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
Mary Oliver
A Thousand Mornings
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” -Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg
“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.” -Emily Bronte, Fall, leaves, fall
“The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man.” -Unknown
“Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” -A.A. Milne
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal–that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.” -Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“My favorite weather is bird chirping weather.” -Terri Guillemets
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