Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. – Rachel Carson
We imagine the Divine as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. – Teilhard de Chardin
There is new life in the soil for every man. There is healing in the trees for tired minds and for our overburdened spirits, there is strength in the hills, if only we will lift up our eyes. Remember that nature is your great restorer. – Calvin Coolidge
Master of the Universe:
Grant me the ability to be alone.
May it be my custom to go outdoors each day
among the trees and grass, among all growing things.
And there may I be alone to enter into prayer,
talking to the One to whom I belong.
May I express there everything in my heart,
and may all the foliage of the field
awake at my coming to send the powers
of their life into the words of my prayer
so that my speech is made whole through
the life and spirit of all growing things,
which are made as one by their transcendent Source.
And through this, may my heart open.
– Rebbe Nachman
We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. – H.D. Thoreau
Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. – Robert Macfarlane
The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask. – Nancy Newhall
Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from. – Terry Tempest Williams
….in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learn’d the language of another world.”
– Lord Byron