Quotes About Nature

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

Again the air is full of falling: the fall of the leaves in the weighty season that brings all home again to the lowly miracle from which they came.

The Wild Geese (excerpt) Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil...It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility...

The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature's world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago, Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;

Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature.

No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its own sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.

The singular demand for production has been unable to acknowledge the importance of the sources of production in nature and in human culture.

Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves

Farming cannot take place except in nature; therefore, if nature does not thrive, farming cannot thrive. But we know too that nature includes us. It is not a place into which we reach from some safe standpoint outside it. We are in it and are a part of it while we use it. If it does not thrive, we cannot thrive. The appropriate measure of farming then is the world's health and our health, and this is inescapably one measure.

Before he started to school he knew this farm as he knew the inside of his clothes.

Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.

And I, through woods and fields, through fallen days Am passing to where I belong: At home, at ease, and well, In Sabbaths of this place Almost invisible, Toward which I go from song to song.

From cloud to sea to cloud, I climb The deer road through the leafless trees Under a wind that batters limb On limb, still roaring as it has Two nights and days, cold in slow spring. But ancient song in a wild throat Recalls itself and starts to sing In storm-cleared light...

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.

The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits; Growth, death, and a restoring form Of human use will make it well. But I go on, beyond, higher In the hill's fold, forget the time I come from and go to, recall This grove left out of all account, A place enclosed in song.

Aunt Beulah could hear the dust motes collide in a sunbeam; she could hear spiders chewing on flies.

Though the spring is late and cold, though uproar of greed and malice shudders in the sky, pond, stream, and treetop raise their ancient songs; the robin molds her mud nest with her breast; the air is bright with breath of bloom, wise loveliness that asks nothing of the season but to be.

The healing that is ours and nature's will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool. There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.