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Henry David Thoreau
(1817 – 1862)

“You must live in the present,
launch yourself on every wave,
find your eternity in each moment.
There is no other land;
there is no other life but this.”

“Take long walks in stormy weather
or through deep snows in the fields and woods,
if you would keep your spirits up.
Deal with brute nature.
Be cold and hungry and weary.”

“A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures
the depth of his own nature.”

“To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over
the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

“Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter,
to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!
The solid earth! The actual world! … Contact! Contact!
Who are we? Where are we?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)

“The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me;
I am part and parcel of God.
In the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets and villages.”
– Nature: Addresses and Lectures, 1849

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field,
it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”
– Nature

“The stars awaken a certain reverence, always present but inaccessible;
but all natural objects make a kindred impression,
when the mind is open to their influence.”
– Nature

“In the woods too, a human casts off years, as the snake his slough,
and at what period soever of life, is always a child.
In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God…
in the woods, we return to reason and faith.
There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,
— no disgrace, no calamity, which nature cannot repair.
Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air,
and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes.
I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all;
the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me;
I am part or particle of the Ultimate Reality.”
– Nature

John Muir
(1838-1914)

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy,
while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that
going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity”

Gary Snyder
(1930- )

”Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

“Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the
stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream,
so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.
Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it.”

“Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity
that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions.
Meditation is going into the mind to see this for yourself — 
over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in.”

My teacher once said to me,
become one with the knot itself till it dissolves away;
sweep the garden.
any size.

The Gaia Hypothesis

The creativity of modern religious thought includes scientist James E. Lovelock,
who posited what might be considered a religious view of “Mother Earth” in his Gaia Hypothesis:
“…the entire Earth is a life-forming and life-sustaining super-organism,
subject to homeostasis; individual species are not permanent, only life alone is;
“Mother Earth” can be accommodating or ruthless with species.
The Gaia Hypothesis also supports the practices of
outdoor spirituality as making a valuable connection with a divine earth.”
– James Lovelock

SCIENTISTS

One cannot but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
It is enough if one tries merely comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
– Albert Einstein
(1879-1995)

After the sun’s energy is captured by the green plants, it flows through chains of organisms dendritically,
like blood spreading from the arteries into the networks of the microscopic capillaries.
It is in such capillaries, in the life cycles of thousands of individual species, that life’s important work is done.
Thus nothing in the whole system makes sense until the natural history of the constituent species becomes known.
The study of every kind of organism matters, everywhere in the world…
– Howard Odum, Ecologist
(1924-2002)

The Eternal Creator is not some kind of watchmaker.
Apologists… were deceived as all the other mechanistic thinkers were,
by not looking closely enough at the wild flowers of the field.
The factory that makes the parts of the flower is inside,
and is not a factory but a development.
The Almighty is more like a chromosome, a thought, than a watchmaker.

The creative principle of the universe and its organization and intelligence is not an external principle but an eternal one.
All of the past that we can ever know is contained in the world at this instant.
– John Platt, Biophysicist
(1918-1992)

The evolutionary unity of humans with all other organisms is the
cardinal message of Darwin’s revolution for nature’s most arrogant species.
– Stephen Jay Gould
(1941-2002)

Commonly we stride through the outdoors too swiftly,
to see the most obvious and prominent things.
For observing Nature, the best pace is a snail’s pace.
– Edwin Teale, Circle of Seasons
(1899-1980)

Wilderness… compels us to measure ourselves against the cosmos.
It makes us realize how insignificant we are as biological creatures and invites us to escape
from the daily life into the realms of eternity and infinity.
– Rene Dubos
(1901-1982)

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth
find reserves of strength that endure as long as life lasts.
– Rachel Carson, A Sense of Wonder
(1907-1964)