Quotes About Nature

Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.

Our indigenous herbalists say to pay attention when plants come to you; they're bringing you something you need to learn.

Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.

Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.

There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan.

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don't have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.

Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream's gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human's education is to know those duties and how to perform them.

Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last—and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind.

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.

I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there's a way out.

My secret self, the scarecrow-Lacey built of twigs and mud and bark, the Lacey who was made of forest and would someday be summoned home.

You making haste haste on decay...

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine. The fleet limbs of the antelope?

Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among the leaves and his hounds tore him A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much.

I wish the little rivers under the laughing kingfishers in every canyon were fire, and the ocean Fire, and my heart not afraid to go down.

poetry cannot speak without remembering the turns of the sun and moon, and the rhythm of the ocean, and the recurrence of human generations, the returning waves of life and death.

It often seemed that the trees were flu of people whispering--especially tonight.

Because, in our society, to be obsessed with a vision about how to make a better automobile makes you a genius, but to be obsessed with a vision about the nature of reality makes you a nut.

A mature wolf can watch and wait for hours, a cub not yet fully a wolf cannot. To him, a pebble is a diamond for a few moments; or a newly found feather becomes the sole thread on which the entire universe is suspended.

24. It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, for the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.

26. The conclusions of human reasoning as ordinarily applied in matters of nature, I call for the sake of distinction anticipations of nature (as something rash or premature). That reason which is elicited from facts by a just and methodical process, I call interpretation of nature.

Generally, or at least very often, people with a deep interest in animals are the best people around.

The very fact of snow is such an amazement.