Quotes About Nature

walked on, thinking about the newspaper article I'd recently come across about three women in California—each one had been killed by a mountain lion on separate occasions over the past year—and

Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.O

Until, that is, a tree stopped me in my path.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild.

How wild it is, to let it be.

The air came alive with the sound of the wind whipping the trees at times and at other times it was profoundly hushed by the endless silencing snow. Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn't wonder where it was.

I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.

I'd been on the PCT for a little more than a month. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.

Here it could be the fourth of July or the tenth of December. These mountains didn't count the days. The

I'd imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I'd thought I'd weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.

He was the first person I'd met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn't need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I'd never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.O

The trees were tall, but I was taller

The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets.

Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.

Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun.

The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

Every evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from the vastness itself.

I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face.

It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.

Put yourself in the way of beauty.

I continued up, into the late afternoon and evening, unable to see anything except what was immediately before me. I wasn't thinking of snakes, as l'd been the day before. I wasn't thinking. I'm hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail. I wasn't even thinking, What have I gotten myself into? I was thinking only of moving myself forward.