nature

"Think about your childhood for a moment. What was your favorite outdoor place to play? What was that environment like? Do your memories evoke specific sights, scents, and sounds? What did you do there? What did it look like and feel like? Did this place change along with the seasons? What sort of games did you play and what did you discover there?

"Most of us have vivid memories of our favorite childhood play environment. This was the place where we began to discover the wonder of playful exploration. It was the place where we first interacted with the natural world. This place was our introduction to the environment, our community, and the cycles of life.

"The places that adults remember playing in as children are so often natural places - places with a stream, clumps of spongy moss, thick layers of slippery mud, fallen logs, or even a mound of dirt piled high in a vacant lot in the city. There is just something about connecting with the natural world that is so important for all people - particularly children. These are the kinds of experiences that nourish our souls.

"Unfortunately, these days many children don't have the kinds of opportunities that we had not so long ago. Our fast-paced culture now places greater emphasis on going, doing, and becoming, and less on wandering, searching, and discovering. With modern urban and suburban development, natural or wild areas are less available."

Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s...

Perhaps it was the eyes of the wolf, measured, calm, knowing.
Perhaps it was the intense sense of family.
After all, wolves mate for life, are loyal partners, create hunting communities
and demonstrate affectionate patience in pup rearing.
Perhaps it was the rigid heirarchy of the packs.
Each wolf had a place in the whole and yet retained his individual personality.
Perhaps it was their great, romping, ridiculous sense of fun.
Perhaps it was some celestial link with thw winter night skies
that prompted the wolf to lay his song on the icy air.
For the native people who lived with the wolves,
and the wolves once ranged from the Arctic to the sub-tropics,
there was much to learn from them.
Is it any wonder that the myths of many tribes characterise the wolves
not as killers but as teachers?"

We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning.  The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which enhances the snug cheer within.  The stillness of the morning is impressive...  From the eaves and fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering some concealed core.  The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences we see fantastic forms stretching in the frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.

Each thing tends to move towards its own nature. I always desire happiness which is my true nature. My nature is never a burden to me. Happiness is never a burden to me, whilst sorrow is.

"The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried."

Faith is a quality of being: of being in touch with oneself, with life, and with the universe. It is a sense of belonging to one’s community, to one’s country and to the earth. Above all it is a feeling of being grounded in one’s body, in one’s humanity, and in one’s animal nature. It can be all of these things because it is a manifestation of life, an expression of the living force that unites all beings. It is a biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation.

It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.

In all things of Nature, there is something of the marvelous.

He loved the earth and all things of the earth.. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard, he knew the lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to the lack of respect for humans too.