Quotes about Nature

The practice of realignment with reality can hardly afford to be utopian. It cannot base itself upon a vision hatched in our heads and then projected into the future. Any approach to current problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future implicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time. It holds us, that is, within the same illusory dimension that enabled us to neglect and finally to forget the land around us. By projecting the solution somewhere outside of the perceivable present, it invites our attention away from the sensuous surroundings, induces us to dull our senses, yet again, on behalf of a mental ideal.

A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present. It strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment. For the other animals and the gathering clouds do not exist in linear time. We meet them only when the thrust of historical time begins to open itself outward, when we walk out of our heads into the cycling life of the land around us. This wild expanse has its own timing, its rhythms of dawning and dusk, its seasons of gestation and bud and blossom. It is here, and not in linear history, that the ravens reside.

To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues we face is already an advance. But if a peaceful world is beyond politics it is also beyond religions as these presently exist. A change is needed in every phase of human life. This lies mainly in recognition that the micro phase, the particular or national traditions, must find their context and fulfillment in the macro phase, the global or panhuman phase of human existence. The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.  There is no time in them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.  Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.  Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.  But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.  He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time.

Science tends more and more to reveal to us the unity that underlies the diversity of nature.  We must have diversity in our practical lives; we must seize Nature by many handles.  But our intellectual lives demand unity, demand simplicity amid all this complexity.  Our religious lives demand the same.  Amid all the diversity of creeds and sects we are coming more and more to see that religion is one, that verbal differences and ceremonies are unimportant, and that the fundamental agreements are alone significant.  Religion as a key or passport to some other world has had its day; as a mere set of statements or dogmas about the Infinite mystery it has had its day.  Science makes us more and more at home in this world, and is coming more and more, to the intuitional mind, to have a religious value.  Science kills credulity and superstition but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the marvelous universe.  It quiets our fears and apprehensions, it pours oil upon the troubled waters of our lives, and reconciles us to the world as it is.

Gardening is its own infuriating design challenge. You fret and you rethink and you second-guess yourself constantly, and then for one delirious, thrilling moment something blooms and you feel utterly triumphant. And then it dies and you are back where you started. You feel like a failure, outwitted by nature. And by rain, or the lack of it. And by that ultimate conspiracy, weeds — endless, unconquerable weeds — like an army in perpetual attack mode. What once seemed a heavenly pursuit now seems beyond hopeless, and therein lies its magic: gardening is the most comprehensively satisfying of design challenges, because when it works you feel like God.

And when it doesn't work, you want to dig a hole in the garden and bury your head in it.

I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues.  I am not festive, though contented.  When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, - to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.  My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

We live in a world of color.  All nature is color: white, black, and grey do not exist except in theory; they are never seen by the eye - they could only exist in a world that was colorless.  Such a universe is beyond imagination: a world without color would be a world without light, for light and color are inseparable.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.

The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms, - the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, snakes, and the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms.  Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, - an occult relation between the very scorpions and man.  I feel the centipede in me, - cayman, carp, eagle, and fox.  I am moved by strange sympathies; I say continually, "I will be a naturalist."

Respect the child.  Wait and see the new product of Nature.  Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions.  Respect the child.  Be not too much his parent.  Trespass not on his solitude.

I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow.  Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself.  I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows.  If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.  Wonderful is its power to charm and to command.  It is a mountain air.  It is the embalmer of the world.  It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary.  It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it.  By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.  Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

moonlight-
         a sand dune
         shifts

After weeks of watching the roof leak
          I fixed it tonight
by moving a single board

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing - going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water.  Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks both in solution and in the form of mud particles, sand, pebbles, and boulders.  Rocks flow from volcanoes like water from springs, and animals flock together and flow in currents modified by stepping, leaping, gliding, flying, swimming, etc.  While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart.

The world, we are told, was made especially for humans - a presumption not supported by all the facts...  Why should humanity value itself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?  And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos?  The universe would be incomplete without humans; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.  From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo Sapiens.  From the same material God has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us.  They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

Our moods do not believe in each other.  To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please.  I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow.  What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.  Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow!  I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast.

All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner-structure of Nature that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on the power of intellect; it is man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.

Life is an intricate pattern of simple designs; we see the intricacy, but once awareness is raised, we can then see simplicity in all things! Start with nature - get outside and embrace it today!

Cheryl Batoon

Each new year is a surprise to us.  We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence.  How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening, reminiscences of our sanest hours.  The voice of nature is always encouraging.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

All excesses are inimical to Nature.  It is safer to proceed a little at a time, especially when changing from one regimen to another.

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture - that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.

I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.

There is something joyful about storms that interrupt routine.  Snow or freezing rain suddenly releases you from expectations, performance demands, and the tyranny of appointments and schedules.  And unlike illness, it is largely a corporate rather than an individual experience.  One can almost hear a unified sigh rise from the nearby city and surrounding countryside where Nature has intervened to give respite to the weary humans slogging it out within her purview.  All those affected this way are untied by a mutual excuse, and the heart is suddenly and unexpectedly giddy.  There will be no apologies needed for not showing up to some commitment or other.  Everyone understands and shares in this singular justification, and the sudden alleviation of the pressure to produce makes the heart merry.

Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.