Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
~ Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Snow Lake, Mt. Rainier National Park – photo by Sandy’s NW Hiking Photos, used with permission
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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only hope.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my childrens life may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry
Wildflowers and Bishop Creek, Eastern Sierra, CA – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission
Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.
~ Henry Beston
Alpine Meadow – Mt Rainier National Park, photo by Bob Cameron, used with permission
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
~ David Wagoner
Mossy Grotto, OR – photo by Chris Williams Exploration Photography, used with permission
When we speak of Nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of Nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.
~ Henri Matisse
Waterwheel Falls, Yosemite – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission
Everywhere water is a thing of beauty, gleaming in the dewdrops; singing in the summer rain; shining in the ice-gems till the leaves all seem to turn to living jewels; spreading a golden veil over the setting sun; or a white gauze around the midnight moon.
~ John Ballantine Gough
El Capitan Reflection, Yosemite – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature – however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be – is never truly alone. The surroundings are sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended. And they must, at every moment, be treated with the proper respect.
~ Richard Nelson
Mouse Creek Falls, NC – photo by Jeff Burcher Photography, used with permission
We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
~ Carl Sagan
Pinnacles National Park – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission