Quotes About Nature

I thought power was something you could control. Something one could do at a desk or on a job site, to work in the field of power. Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump where what felt like wisdom once was.

I'm the hidden bug in the tall weeds, lighting fires no one can see.

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why can't I just love the flower for being a flower? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

Beetle on the wainscoting, dead branch breaking but not breaking, stones from the sea next to stones from the river, unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat, a siren whining high toward town repeating that the emergency is not here, repeating that this loud silence is only where you live.

A view of some tree breathing and the mind's wheels ease up on the pavement's tug. That tree, that one willowy thing over there, can save a life, you know? It saves by not trying, a leaf like some note slipped under the locked blue door (bathtub full, despair's drunk), a small live letter that says only, Stay.

How good it is to love live things, even when what they've done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into out own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.

crossed-legged with my friend named Echo who taught me how to amplify the strange sound the frogs made by cupping my ears. I need to hold this close within me, when today's news is full of dead children, their faces opening their mouths for air that will not come. Once I was a child too and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour, eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping and uncapping our ears to hear the song the tenderest animals made.

I once had a record of whale sounds, I swear I understood.

How good it is to love live things, even when what they've done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into our own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. Why can't I just love the flowers for being a flower? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too.

The true and serious beauty of trees, how it seemed insane that they should offer this to us, how unworthy we were, bewildered, how soon we were nearly weeping at their trunks as they tossed down petal after petal, and we tried to remember how it felt to receive and notice the receiving, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink.

Two female horses, retired mares, separated by a sliding barn door, nose each other. Neither of them will get pregnant again, their job is to just be a horse.

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.

On increasingly warm nice days I liked to sit toward noon on the bench encircling the cherry tree and look at the bare trees, the freshly plowed fields, the green strips of winter planting, the meadows that were already sprouting, and through the fragrance which swells out of the ground with the advent of spring contemplate the mountains, gleaming with the colossal quantities of snow still on them.

Here for example the beautiful silver mirror of a river swells, a boy falls in, the water ripples sweetly around his locks, he sinks - and after a short while the silver mirror swells as before.

While they were speaking of - in their opinion - great things, around about them only little things - also in their opinion - were happening: everywhere the bushes were turning green, the brooding earth was germinating and beginning to play with her first little Spring creatures, as one might with jewels.

I have never forgotten how you looked on that Sunday, Bertha: your lips of red as you sat talking with me on the sun-drenched stones, your eyes shining in the forest.

When all were gone, Witiko stood with Bertha on the southern balcony pointing out the meadows and mountains he had told her of on the stones of the lonely meadow near her father's forest home.

people don't entertain you, / Nature will"—is

The very definition of 'beauty' is outside.

Now an infinite happiness cannot be purchased by any price less than that which is infinite in value and infinity of merit can only result from a nature that is infinitely divine or perfect.

There were times when he had the air of a mystic about him, as children sometimes do, as if he were staring calmly into the nature of things and had the wisdom to know there were no words for it.