Quotes About Nature

Thus among the Carrier Indians 33 when a man wants to become a Lulem, or Bear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on a bearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days.

I've heard them lilting, at the ewe milking,Lasses a' lilting, before dawn of day;But now they are moaning, on ilka green loaning;The flowers of the forest are a' wede away.

A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring.

On the whole I think poems don't crawl out of dreams. They are knocked out of rocks.

Roots creep under the ground to make a firm foundation. Shoots seems new and small, but to reach the light they can break through brick walls.

I looked up then, out the far window, and there, just within sight, the sun was going down across the river. It was dull red, no longer shining over the land, its ray brought home to roost, contained within its sphere. The sky was streaked with lavendar, a pulsing pale blue, purple and smudged pink and orange melding into one another all the way to the horizon.

I will hear a noise, like a fish jumping, and when I look I'll see Lizzy coming to the surface, shaking off her pink scales, finding her new arms to do the breaststroke to shore.

The karma of the fishermen spins out as they head out across the lake dropping a line into the depths— delighted when they see a golden-eyed fish, and unhappy when they do not.

When a man falls in love with a woman, it is like an arrow piercing the meadow; when a woman falls in love with a man, it is like grain scattered on rocks.

Even before the sun lights the day, fireflies illuminate the path.

When red fires blaze in the mountains, why would one need more dry wood? When great rivers are already swollen with water, what need could there be for a heavy rain? When there is already discord between countries, why stir up further turmoil?

spider crawls along his back, and other intricately woven lines join them all together.

sit on the craggy cliffs of Ballyhock to the waves crashing on the beach. Strong. Powerful. Deadly. A combination so familiar to me it brings me comfort.

Iwatch from where I sit on the craggy cliffs of Ballyhock to the waves crashing on the beach. Strong.

rises in early May at precisely 5:52 a.m., and it's rare I get to watch it. So this morning, in the small quiet interim before daybreak and our meeting, I came to the cliff's edge. I've traveled the world for my family's business, from the highest ranges of the Alps to the depths of

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider." [ Autumn ]

The Promise" Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower. Stay, I said to the spider, who fled. Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself. Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble. Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence. Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.

To Hear the Falling World Only if I move my arm a certain way, it comes back. Or the way the light bends in the trees this time of year, so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart. I carry this in my body, seed in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe. But they guard me, these small pains, from growing sure of myself and perhaps forgetting.

There are worlds / in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.

Bash? wrote, "The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.

I know I shouldn't be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I've thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I'm captivated by the mountain stream's interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life.

When the body dies, where will they go, those migrant birds and prayer calls, as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer? With voices of the ones I loved, great loves and small loves, train wheels, crickets, clock-ticks, thunder – where will they, when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

There is more and more I tell no one, strangers nor loves. This slips into the heart without hurry, as if it had never been. And yet, among the trees, something has changed. Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am. from "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight" The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 277, no. 6, June 2016)