When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it’s more like a whole symphony orchestra.
~ Laura Erickson, The Bird Watching Answer Book
There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
~ Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion
Deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take. It is the attitude we call courage.
~ Br. David Steindl-Rast
Our experiences of embodiment may not always correspond with idealized images of holiness, but these preconceptions derive from masculine standards of perfection. Such paradigms have caused great harm, and they are no longer valid. I invite you to abandon your efforts to fix yourself and instead reclaim your innate beauty and worth as a luminous cell in the body of Mother Earth.
~ Mirabai Starr
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
~ Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation
It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
With an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.~ William Wordsworth
The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes … and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.
~ Leslie Stephen
You can’t change who you are, but you can change what you have in your head, you can refresh what you’re thinking about, you can put some fresh air in your head.
~ Ernesto Bertarelli
Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.
~ Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
When all the world appears to be in a tumult, and nature itself is feeling the assault of climate change, the seasons retain their essential rhythm. Yes, fall gives us a premonition of winter, but then, winter, will be forced to relent, once again, to the new beginnings of soft greens, longer light, and the sweet air of spring.
~ Madeleine M. Kunin
