MEDITATIONS ON NATURE

If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make anything from a spoon to a landing-craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture.

Henry Beston

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of the fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman 

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

Rachel Carson 

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

 John Muir

Only spread a fern-frond over a man's head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in.

John Muir 

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.  This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of all . . . There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy.  It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.

Thomas Merton 

Look!  Look!  Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.

Albert Einstein

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

E.B. White 

The earth laughs in flowers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

Henry David Thoreau

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

                                         i thank You God for this most amazing

                                         day: for the leaping greenly spirit of trees

                                         and a blue dream of sky; and for everything

                                         which is natural which is infinite which is yes

e.e. cummings

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu

The world will never starve for wonder, but only for want of wonder.

C.K. Chesterton

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains?  Nature remains.

Walt Whitman

Notes on Photos:  All photos were taken in the last couple of days here in coastal South Carolina. 

QUIET THOUGHTS, QUIET BEAUTY

Sitting here at home today, listening to Chris Botti's amazing trumpet, his mood-altering rendition of Caruso, I am drawn to quiet thoughts of quiet beauty. Here is a sampling of the beauty that I find in or near my little corner of the world -- accompanied by the moving words of some who have also found inspiration in the natural world.

              Flowers at the Local Farmers Market

"Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity"

                                                                                                      

 John Ruskin

     Great Egret at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird . . . So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.  I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

                                                                                                     

 Richard P. Feynman

Sunrise at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge

"The grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.  Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."

                                                                                                         

John Muir

     Blue Heron, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

"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 children's lives 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 or 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 I am free."

                                                                                                      

Wendell Berry

              Tulips

       "Guarded within the old red wall's embrace,

      Marshalled like soldiers in gay company,

    The tulips stand arrayed.  Here infantry

Wheels out into the sunlight."

             Amy Lowell

            A Tulip Garden

Looking at these images again, I am overwhelmed by the ineffable beauty of the world around us -- its diversity, its myriad colors, its constant ebb and flow, its stirring  call to the human spirit -- and I am grateful for the the poets and other writers who have always called upon us to pay attention and be present with nature.