passages and quotations on nature--page three

Those who understand nature
walk with God.

Edgar Cayce

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

Go outside, to the fields, enjoy nature and the sunshine,
go out and try to recapture happiness in yourself and in God.
Think of all the beauty that’s still left in and around you and be happy!

Anne Frank

Nature has given to each
conscious being every
power she possesses, and
one of these abilities is
this: just as Nature
converts and alters every
obstacle and opposition,
and fits them into their
predestined place, making
them a part of herself,
so too the rational person
is able to finesse every
obstacle into an
opportunity, and to use
it for whatever purpose
it may suit.

Marcus Aurelius

Nature always takes her time. Great oaks don't become great overnight. They also lose a lot of leaves, branches, and bark in the process of becoming great.

Andrew Matthews

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is a succession of changes so gentle and easy we can scarcely mark their progress.

Charles Dickens

I loved the rain as a child. I loved the sound of it
on the leaves of trees and roofs and window panes and
umbrellas and the feel of it on my face and bare legs.
I loved the hiss of rubber tires on rainy streets and
the flip-flop of windshield wipers. I loved the smell
of wet grass and raincoats and the shaggy coats of dogs.
A rainy day was a special day for me in a sense that no
other kind of day was--a day when the ordinariness of things
was suspended with ragged skies drifting to the color of
pearl and dark streets turning to dark rivers of reflected
light and even people transformed somehow as the rain drew
them closer by giving them something to think about together,
to take common shelter from, to complain of and joke about
in ways that made them more like friends than it seemed to me
they were on ordinary sunny days. But more than anything,
I think, I loved rain for the power it had to make indoors
seem snugger and safer and a place to find refuge in from
everything outdoors that was un-home, unsafe. I loved rain
for making home seem home more deeply.

Frederick Buechner

HOME - contents - Full Life Online
abundance - acceptance - achievement - action - adversity - aging - anticipation - appreciation - attitude - authenticity
awareness - balance - beauty - being yourself - beliefs - body - character - children - Christianity - coincidence
commitment - common sense - community - compassion - compliments - compromise - confidence - conscience
contentment - courage - creativity - death - determination - earth - ego - encouragement - enthusiasm - eternity
faith - family - flowers - forgiveness - freedom - friendship - fun - gardening - gentleness - giving - God - goodness
grace - gratitude -growing up - happiness - healing - helpfulness - home - hope - humility - imagination
integrity - joy - kindness - laughter - learning - letting go - life - listening - love - marriage - miracles - mystery
nature - now - open-mindedness - opportunity - optimism - patience - peace - perseverance - perspective
play - prayer - principle - purpose - religion - rest - role models - sadness - self - self-respect - serving others - silence
simplicity - spirit - success - time - today - truth - values - war - wisdom - wonder - work - worship
spring - summer - fall - winter - Christmas - Thanksgiving - New Year - zen sayings
obstacles to living life fully - e-zine archives - quotations contents

There is no trifling with nature; it is always true,
dignified, and just; it is always in the right, and the
faults and errors belong to us. Nature defies
incompetence, but reveals its secrets to the
competent, the truthful, and the pure.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort,
nor anything else in which God is left out. Whether you like it or not,
whether you know it or not, secretly nature seeks, hunts, tries to
ferret out the track on which God may be found.

Meister Eckhart

Spend time in a flower garden. Stay there as long as you wish, but make sure your visit is long enough to take in the various charms that the world of blossoms and petals provides. You can sit in a chair or on the grass, lie down looking up at the flowers from below, or walk around. However you choose to spend your time, be aware that you are a guest in someone else's home--nature's--so act accordingly.

If the day is warm and sunny, savor the rays and imagine how the flowers must feel at this very moment. Look closely at the variety of blooms, at the different shapes and colors, at the way the individual blossoms grow out of their leafy sheaths. Now use your sense of smell to take in the stunning array of fragrance, all of which can be divinely overpowering.

Keep an eye out for the various animal life that also lives in the garden, the birds and squirrels, the insects that fly, the ones that crawl. Notice how intently they go about their business, how they move from place to place trying not to notice you but in fact finding that task difficult. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the garden, the chirping and humming, and the movement of the stems and leaves in the mild breeze.

Now see if you can transcend your individual senses and feel the presence of the garden inside you. Try to become just another flower, at home in the garden as if you were in your own house or place of worship.

Alan Epstein

Believe one who has tried, you shall find a fuller satisfaction
in the woods than in the books. The trees and the rocks will
teach you that which you cannot hear from the masters.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux

We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics. . . . We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter--grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifested to us in the form of real grass.

Mohawk Nation

We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our kinship with the animals and the water and the sea. To say that the divinity informs all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.

Joseph Campbell

With nature's help, humankind can set into creation all that
is necessary and life sustaining. Everything in nature, the sum
total of heaven and of earth, becomes a temple
and an altar for the service of God.

Hildegard of Bingen

All things in nature work silently. They come into being and possess nothing.
They fulfill their function and make no claim. All things alike do their work,
and then we see them subside. When they have reached their bloom,
each returns to its origin. . . . This reversion is an eternal law.
To know that law is wisdom.

Lao-Tzu

Nature is school-mistress, the soul the pupil;
and whatever one has taught or the other learned
has come from God--the Teacher of the teacher.

Tertullian

Creation was given to people as a clean window through which
the light of God could shine into people’s souls. Sun and moon,
night and day, rain, sea, the crops, the flowering tree, all these
things were transparent. They spoke to people not of themselves
but only of Him who made them. Nature was symbolic. But the
progressive degradation of humans led them further and further
from this truth. Nature became opaque.

Thomas Merton

I have had more than half a century of such happiness.
A great deal of worry and sorrow, too, but never
a worry or a sorrow that was not offset by a purple iris,
a lark, a bluebird, or a dewy morning glory.

Mary McLeod Bethune

There is no quiet place in [your] cities, no place to hear
the leaves of spring or the rustle of insects’ wings. . . .
The Indians prefer the soft sound of the wind darting over the
face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday
rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the
Indian, for all things share the same breath—the animals,
the trees, the human. Like a person who has been dying
many days, a person in your city is numb to the stench.

attributed to Chief Seattle

God, we thank you for this earth, our homes; for the wide sky and
the blessed sun, for the salt sea and the running water, for the everlasting
hills and the never resting winds, for trees and the common grass underfoot.
We thank you for our senses by which we hear the songs of birds, and see
the splendor of the summer fields, and taste of the autumn fruits, and rejoice
in the feel of the snow, and smell the breath of the spring. Grant us a heart
wide open to all this beauty; and save our souls from being so blind that we
pass unseeing when even the common thorn bush is aflame with your glory.

Walter Rauschenbusch

Contemplate the workings of this world. Study how water flows
in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks.
Everything--even mountains, rivers, plants and trees--should be your teacher.

Morihei Ueshiba

There's nothing like a walk in the forest to clear my mind and get my spirit to calm down and slow down. Any time I get away from the mass of people and find a quiet, solitary spot in nature, be it in the middle of the desert, in the forest, on a beach, or even along a lonely country road, I feel myself being refreshed, revived, renewed. It's a wonderful feeling that I don't search out nearly enough.

tom walsh

When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think,
to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions. To approach the land
as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay
in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience.
We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more than we imagine,
and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language. In these ways
we begin, I think, to find a home, to sense how to fit a place.

Barry Lopez

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Dear God, we give thanks for places of simplicity and peace. Let us
find such a place within ourselves. We give thanks for places of refuge
and beauty. Let us find such a place within ourselves. We give thanks
for places of nature's truth and freedom, of joy, inspiration and renewal,
places where all creatures may find acceptance and belonging. Let us
search for these places: in the world, in ourselves and in others. Let us
restore them. Let us strengthen and protect them and let us create them.
May we mend this outer world according to the truth of our inner life
and may our souls be shaped and nourished by nature's eternal wisdom.
Amen.

Leunig

For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars,
but on the earth he has sowed his name in tender flowers.

Jean Paul Richter

We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it.
We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.

Edward Abbey