nature 2
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I felt my lungs inflate with
the onrush
of scenery-- air, mountains, trees,
people. I thought, "This is what
it is to be happy.”
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar
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Nature,
like a loving mother, is ever trying
to keep land
and sea,
mountain and valley,
each in its place, to hush
the angry
winds
and waves, balance the extremes of heat
and cold,
of rain and drought, that peace,
harmony and beauty may
reign supreme.
Elizabeth
Cady
Stanton
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People are incomprehensible without Nature, and Nature is
incomprehensible
apart from people. For the delicate
loveliness of the flower is as much
in the human eye as
in its own fragile petals, and the splendor
of the
heavens as much in the imagination that kindles at the
touch
of their glory as in the shining of countless
worlds.
Hamilton
Wright Mabie
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In
those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm
and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness
against
Nature not to go out, and see her riches,
and partake in
her rejoicing with heaven and earth.
John
Milton
Nature has given the opportunity of
happiness
to all, knew they but how to use it.
Claudian
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What riches are ours in the world of nature, from
the majesty
of the distant peak to the fragile beauty of a tiny flower,
and all without cost to us, the beholders! No person is poor
who has watched a sunrise or who keeps a mountain in his or her heart.
Esther Baldwin York
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Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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Old and
new put their stamp on everything in nature. The
snowflake
that is now falling is marked by both; the
present gives the motion
and color to the flakes;
antiquity its form and properties. All things wear
a
luster which is the gift of the present and a tarnish of
time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Nature ne'er
deserts
the wise
and pure;
No plot so narrow,
be but nature
there,
No waste
so vacant,
but
may well employ
Each faculty of
sense
and keep the heart
Awake to love and beauty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Never does nature say one
thing and wisdom another.
Juvenal
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When the first light dawned on the earth,
and the birds awoke, and
the brave river was heard
rippling confidently seaward, and the nimble early
rising
wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all people,
having reinforced
their bodies and their souls with sleep,
and cast aside doubt and fear,
were invited to
unattempted adventures.
Henry David Thoreau |
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Only to the white
man was nature a wilderness and only to him
was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and
"savage" people.
To us it was tame, Earth was bountiful, and we were surrounded
with the blessings of the Great Mystery.
Black Elk
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I go now
to the wilderness to be a part of it; to accept my place
in the world and its place in me; to grow into reality as
a tree grows
into the rain, to conform to the Earth as a
stream conforms
to the stones of its bed. To live. To
aspire. To be.
William
Ashworth |
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The motion felt by a person in the
presence of nature
certainly counts for something in the
origin of religions.
Henry Bergson |
The
garden is growth and change and that means loss
as well
as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.
May
Sarton |
There
is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds,
the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the
spring. There
is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of
nature--the
assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.
Rachel Carson |
When we pay attention to nature's music,
we find that
everything on the earth
contributes to its harmony.
Hazrat Inayat Khan |
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Close your eyes.
You might try saying. . .
something like this:
"The sun is shining overhead. The sky is blue and sparkling.
Nature is calm and in
control of the world--and I, as nature's
child,
am in
tune with the Universe." Or--better still--pray!
Dale Carnegie
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There
is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour, in which
nature does not exhibit color which no mortal effort can
imitate or approach. For all our artificial pigments are,
even when seen under the same circumstances, dead and
lightless
beside her living color; nature exhibits her
hues under an intensity
of sunlight which trebles their
brilliancy.
John Ruskin
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Nature is a part of our
humanity, and without some awareness and
experience of that divine mystery, humans cease to be human.
Henry Beston |
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If you drive nature out with a
pitchfork,
she will soon find a way back.
Horace |
nature 2
- nature 3 - nature 4
- nature 5
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All of
nature offers lessons on living, free of charge. One
morning
I noticed a dead tree supporting many living
things--fungus, vines,
lichen--which taught me that even
after death we can continue
to
support those who live on.
Living trees on our property teach
other
lessons. One
tree has grown around a barbed wire fence. Another
has
grown around a nail, and a third through a chain link
fence.
These trees teach me how to accept irritation,
absorb
the pain and
grow around problems. Nature teaches
me how
to find my place,
grow toward the sunlight and
bypass obstacles. To survive, we must
be able to change
in response to whatever is required by the
challenge of
the moment. Our bodies know this,
but our
minds often
rebel when change is necessary.
Bernie S. Siegel
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Nature
gives to every time and season some beauties of its own;
and from
morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave,
it is but a
succession of changes so gentle and easy
that we can scarcely mark
their progress.
Charles Dickens
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The
longer I live the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and
wonder
of the world. . . I have loved the feel of the grass
under my feet, and
the sound of the running streams by my
side. The hum of the wind in the
treetops has always
been good music to me, and the face of the fields
has often
comforted me more than the faces of people.
I am in love with this world. . . I have tilled its
soil, I have gathered
its harvest, I have waited upon its
seasons, and always have I reaped
what I have sown.
I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests,
sailed its waters,
crossed its deserts, felt the sting if its
frosts, the oppression of its heats,
the drench of its rains,
the fury of its winds, and always have beauty
and joy waited
upon my goings and comings.
John
Burroughs
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Look deep into nature and you will
find the answer to everything.
Albert Einstein
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Breathing
Air: 1874
Every weary person seeking with damaged instinct the high
founts of nature, when he or she chances into the mountains,
if accustomed to philosophize at all, if not too far gone in
civilization, will ask, Whence comes? What is the secret
of the mysterious enjoyment felt here--the strange calm, the
divine frenzy? Whence comes the annihilation of bonds
that seemed everlasting?
Tell me what you will of the benefactions of city
civilization, of the sweet security of the streets--all as
part of the natural upgrowth of humans towards the high
destiny we hear so much of. I know that our bodies were
made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure
air is found. If the death exhalations that brood the
broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves were made
visible, we should flee as from a plague.
Go now and then for fresh life--if most of humanity must go
through this town stage of development--just as divers hold
their breath and come ever and anon to the surface to breathe.
. . . Go whether or not you have faith. . . . Form parties, if
you must be social, to go to the snow-flowers in winter, to
the sun-flowers in summer. . . Anyway, go up and away for
life; be fleet!
John Muir
Trails of Wonder |
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The
Trees
The
trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is
it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet
still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Philip
Larkin
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Nature
is the clearest source of
solitude. The greatness of nature
can
overwhelm
the insignificant chatter
by which we measure
most of our
days. If you have the wisdom and
the courage
to go to nature
alone, the larger rhythms,
the eternal hum,
will
make itself known all
the sooner. When you have found it,
it will always
be there for
you. The peace without
will become
the peace within, and
you will be able to return to it in your
heart wherever you find yourself.
Kent Nerburn |
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I
am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough
to go in when it
rains. One may keep snug and dry
by such knowledge, but one
misses a world of loveliness.
Adeline
Knapp
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quotations
- contents
-
welcome
page
-
obstacles
the
people behind the words
-
our
current e-zine
-
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and excerpts
Daily
Meditations, Year One - Year
Two - Year Three
- Year Four
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Nature and people are simply
part of one another. If we bring
our awareness to what is around us and within us, this becomes
obvious. We cannot be considered separate. The natural
world
is at the very heart of our being. If we are willing to listen
and pay
attention to nature, we will begin to recognize our innate sense of
connection and belonging. Mindfulness of the natural world will
probably be one of our deepest experiences and our
greatest opportunities to feel truly alive.
Claire Thompson
Mindfulness
and the Natural World
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To
speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do
not
see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.
The
sun
illuminates only the eye of the adult,
but shines into the eye and heart
of the child. The lover of nature is the person whose inward and
outward
senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the
spirit
of infancy even into the era of adulthood.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
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I never
knew how soothing trees are--many trees and patches of open
sunlight,
and tree presences; it is almost like
having another being.
D.H.
Lawrence |
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We
are all of us cut off from nature, and not only the town dwellers.
It is perhaps important to remember something that we sometimes
forget: that a field is as much a human product as a
street. It is only
on the seashore, on the moors, and in a few forests, that we see
nature anything like what it was before man interfered with it.
Yet
if we are intellectually and emotionally cut off from nature,
we suffer a loss which is hard to define.
J.B.S. Haldane
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nature 2
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