A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.
Despair not ! Everything is under control and is exactly as it should be under the present circumstances. There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there,......sitting in his sphere.
We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents,
and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. The world is mind precipitated,
and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free
thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind,
of natural objects.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.
Never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of drugs or of alcohol. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.
Nature has a higher end, in the production of individuals, than 'security', namely 'ascension', or, the passage of the soul into higher forms.
One whose heart is touched with the love of Nature is growing spiritually, and someday will find the great, the profounder, meaning of life.
With our senses applied to the surrounding world we are reading our
own physical and corresponding moral revolutions. Nature was so shallow
all at once I did not know what had attracted me all my life. I was
therefor encouraged when, going through a field this evening, I was unexpectedly
struck by the beauty of an apple tree. The perception of beauty is
a moral test.
Is not the rainbow a faint vision of God's face? How glorious
should be the life of man passed under this arch! What more remarkable
phenomenon than a rainbow, yet how little it is remarked!
I drank some high-colored water from a little stream in the meadow;
for I love to drink the water of the meadow or the river I pass the day
on, and so get eyes to see it with.
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink,
taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Be
blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all the
tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Grow
green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each seasons
influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies, mixed for your especial
use. For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well.
She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. Would you be
well? See that you are attuned to each mood of Nature.
Measure your health with your sympathy with morning and spring.
If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature,....if the prospect
of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first
robin does not thrill you,....then know that the spring and morning of
your life is past. Thus you may feel your pulse.
After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance.
I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic,
hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though
in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse.
A hard, insensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than
a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy,
I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft.
If I would preserve my relation to Nature, I must make my life more
moral, more pure and innocent. The problem is as precise and simple
as a mathematical one. I must not live loosely, but more and more
continently.
The winter, cold and bound as it is, is
thrown to us like a bone to
a famished dog and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. But
the winter was not given to us for no purpose. If it is a cold and
hard season, it's fruit, no doubt, is the more concentrated and nutty.
It took the cold and bleakness of November to ripen the walnut, but the
human brain is the kernel which the winter itself matures. The seasons
were not made in vain. Because the fruits of the earth are already
ripe, we are not to suppose that there is no fruit left for winter to ripen.
It is for man that the seasons and all their fruits exist. The winter
was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his brain,
to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is
the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought. All previous
harvests are stubble to this, mere fodder and green crop. Now we
burn with a purer flame like the stars; our oil is winter strained
!
Every part of Nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the
making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving
within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a rich vigorous
life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the
harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant abrasion
and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I
reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain
oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will
constitute my second growth.
The last sunrise I witnessed seemed
to outshine the splendor of all
the preceding ones, and I was convinced that it behooved man to dawn as
freshly, and with equal promise and steadiness advance into the career
of life, with as lofty and serene a countenance to move onward through
his mid-day to a yet fairer and more promising setting. We
will have a dawn, and noon, and serene sunset in our lives. What
we call the gross atmosphere of evening, is the accumulated deed of the
day, which absorbs the rays of beauty, and shows more richly than the naked
promise of the dawn. By earnest toil in the heat of the noon, let
us get ready a rich western blaze against the evening of our lives.
The eternity that I detect in Nature I predicate of myself also.
How many springs I have had this same experience! I am encouraged
for I recognize this steady persistency and recovery of Nature as
a quality of myself.
To conduct oneself without guile is to conduct oneself in a natural
manner, and to do this is to be in contact with nature. By maintaining
awareness of the way of nature, the wise person becomes aware of the Tao,
and so becomes aware that this is how its seemingly unfathomable mysteries
may be experienced.
A dilettantism towards nature is barren and unworthy.... and it follows....a dilettantism toward philosophy is also barren and unworthy. Get serious.... or go home!!
To the intelligent, nature converts
itself into a vast promise, and
will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. There are
a thousand meanings in every view, if only we can open ourselves to see
the scripture of the landscape. Nature's attractions are the keys
which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.
Rotation is the law of nature.
The earth laughs in flowers, .....and what is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered. Emerson
Everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active. No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard.
The path of science and of letters is not the way into nature.
The idiot, the indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand
nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or
the antiquary.
He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.
We see the foaming brook with compunction: if our own life flowed with
the right energy, we should shame the brook.
If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely wasteland of the pinewoods.
He who studies Nature, studies God. The ways of nature are symbolic of God's ways. We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
The man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything
so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset.
The country life is to be preferr'd; for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men: and the one makes a better subject for our contemplation than the other.
My profession is to be always alert to find God in nature, to know his
lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.
Ah! if I could so live that there should be no desultory moment
in all my life! that in the trivial season, when small fruits are
ripe, my fruits shall be ripe also! that I could match nature always
with my moods! that in each season when some part of nature especially
flourishes, then a corresponding part of me may not fail to flourish.
Ah, I would walk, I would sit and sleep, with natural piety. It seems to
me that I am more rewarded for my expectations than for anything I do or
can do.
"Every now and then take a good look at something not made with hands - a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come to you wisdom, and patience, and solace, and above all the assurance that you are not alone in the world."
" The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. "
Bookmark this page and visit again.
Have a 'Fresh Thought' e-mailed to you every day. Simply send me an e-mail with 'subscribe' in the subject line. |