nature

Certainly there is life and there is death, but even in death, if we look closely enough, we will find grace.

God can and does use anything God chooses to get our attention. Who's to say the hawk wasn't sent as an agent of grace to catch my wandering attention and quiet what Buddhists might call my __onkey mind,_ which is more often than not swinging wildly from branch to branch on intellectual and emotional trees. On the way back down the hiking trail after my encounter with the hawk in Big Sky, I stopped thinking and started looking and listening. That's when I realized winter was turning into spring before me. Change was happening. Creation, and perhaps the Creator, was speaking. I just needed to be outside to hear the voice.

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.

There are gentler and more graceful ways to interface with natural conflict.

Petals don't ask Where to landThey just fall With grace.

Emotion has its place, but it must not interfere with taking the appropriate action.

That's the trouble with loving a wild thing: You're always left watching the door.But you also get kind of used to it.

Beyond the wall of the unreal city _ there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then __ay your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.

Daddy was always searching for new adventure--always looking for a revelation. He used to say 'If you climb every mountain and walk into every valley, one day you'll surprise the Great Creator at his work.

...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...

The world is full of grief and no peace but every body has a different way of ending it.

Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy.

I wish the night would end,I wish the day'd begin,I wish it would rain or snow,or the wind would blow,or the grass would grow,I wish I had yesterday,I wish there were games to play...

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

Darkness is drowned by three lights; nature, knowledge, and truth.

As soon as the torch went out the atmosphere of the forest intensified. As her eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness she started to notice the outlines of canopies above them where trees were silhouetted against the pale moonlight.The sounds around them became more noticeable; the shuffling of an animal through the undergrowth, the whistling of the wind through the trees, and now and then the cry of some creature being captured in the darkness.As they sat quietly, the noises seemed to become louder still until both visitors felt absorbed into the forest world.

And there, next to me, as the east wind blows in early fall, a season open to great migrations, are those lives, threading the air and waters of the sea, that come out of an incomparable darkness, which is also my own.

Beauty can be found in the most frightening of places. You just have to be open to the possibility that in truth, there's nothing to fear.