MORNING WALKS, TIMELESS WISDOM

Never say there is nothing beautiful 

in the world anymore.  There is always something

to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

Albert Schweitzer

I took another walk this morning through the 300-acre South Carolina Botanical Garden, which, to my good fortune, is located less than half an hour from my house. As I had done in recent days, I took my camera and was primarily focused on capturing images of some of the butterflies that are abundant in this area this during July and August.  As I finished taking photos of the butterflies and began returning to my car, I turned around and saw these wonderful green, oval leaves that were backlit by the sun.  It was a truly magical moment, one of those luminous moments in which time seems to be literally suspended.  After a few minutes of absorbing what I was seeing, I shot the header photo, which turned out to be my favorite image of the day. 

Here are some of the other images I've taken in recent days — mostly butterflies and moths, but also a few flowers along the way.  I've also added some insightful words from others who, like me, find nature to be a perennial source of beauty, contentment, and joy. 

I only ask to be free.

The butterflies are free.

Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole

what it concedes to the butterflies.

Charles Dickens

Bleak House

Happiness is like a butterfly:
the more you chase it, the more it will elude you,
but if you turn your attention to other things, 
it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

Henry David Thoreau

It seems to me that the natural world
is the greatest source of excitement; 
the greatest source of visual beauty;
the greatest source of intellectual interest.
It is the greatest source
 of so much in life that makes life worth living.

David Attenborough

Deep in their roots, 
all flowers keep the light.

Theodore Roethke

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.

R.H. Heinlein

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven
unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

Michelangelo

I embrace emerging experience.

I participate in discovery.

I am a butterfly.

I am not a butterfly collector.

I want the experience of the butterfly.

William Stafford

The temple bell stops
but I still hear the sound
coming out of the flowers.

Basho

I dreamed I was a butterfly,
flitting around in the sky;
then I awoke.  
Now I wonder:
Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly,
or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

Chuang Tzu

When you take a flower in your hand
and really look at it, it's your world for the moment.
I want to give that world to someone else.
Most people in the city rush around so,
they have no time to look at a flower.
I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

Georgia O'Keefe

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we would rise up rooted, like trees.

Rilke

The earth laughs in flowers.

Emerson

It is written on the arched sky;
it looks out from every star.
It is the poetry of Nature;
it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

John Ruskin

Nature is not a place to visit.
It is home.

Gary Snyder

I go to nature to be soothed,
and healed,
and to have my senses put in order.

John Burroughs

The butterfly counts not
months but moments,
and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

Nature never deceives us;
it is we who deceive ourselves.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

Lord Byron

A NEW YEAR, HAT ON HEAD, BOOTS ON FEET

                                                    As the year concludes—

                                                    wanderer's hat on my head,

                                                    sandals on my feet

                                   

                                                                  Basho

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

           Anatole France 

         Not all who wander are lost.

            J.R.R. Tolkien

Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself—if I may use that expression—as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot.

                                                        Jean-Jacques Rousseau

                                           
                                            We are the music makers,
                                            And we are the dreamers of dreams,
                                            Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
                                            And sitting by desolate streams;
                                            World-losers and world-forsakers,
                                            On whom the pale moon gleams:
                                            Yet we are the mover and shakers
                                            Of the world for ever, it seems.

          Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy 

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering.  The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes part of the tangible world.  It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now and for ever.

Freya Stark 

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.

Ray Bradbury

                     Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least

                     possible baggage, and discover the world.

                     It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property,

                     triviality, to simply walk away.

                     That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, 

                     so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

                                                     Thomas A. Clark

                                              from "In Praise of Walking"

Happy New Year to my treasured blogging friends!  May our paths continue to intersect, here and elsewhere.

ONE THOUSAND MILES OF JOY

Yesterday, I reached my goal of hiking 1,000 miles before embarking upon my coast-to-coast trek across England in June.  "An accomplishment," some have already said, but that's not how I really feel about the experience.  I simply feel blessed -- and grateful, of course, that I have have been given an opportunity to spend  a little time dancing with the natural rhythms of the universe, if only for a brief interlude.  Every step was a step of joy, an opportunity to see something new and exciting, a chance to listen to my life and get some sense of my place in the larger scheme of things.

In the region of the south where I spent my youth, shop owners would sometimes offer customers lagniappe after a purchase.  Lagniappe, as I learned from my parents at an early age, is an unearned or undeserved gift that is offered as a kind of bonus or goodwill measure.  Nature, I find, offers lagniappe to walkers.  We go out looking for one thing and we return having received so much more.  As Rebecca Solnit has written in Wanderlust, her fabulous book on the history of walking:

The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you.  Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

Walking offers myriad benefits and pleasures, including health, clear thinking, creativity, and spiritual renewal. I am tempted, of course, to write about each of these benefits.  For the moment, however, I simply invite my readers to enjoy what others have said about the joys of walking.

Walking and health --

     Walking is man's best medicine.

     Hippocrates

     A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good
     for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than
     all the medicine and psychology in the world.

     Paul Dudley White
     Renowned Cardiologist


     Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.
     Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being
     and walk away from illness.

     Soren Kierkegaard


     When you have worn out your shoes,
     the strength of the shoe leather has passed
     into the fiber of your body.  I measure your health
     by the number of shoes and hats and clothes you
     have worn out.

     Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walking and thought --

     All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

     Frederick Nietzsche


     I can only meditate when I am walking.  When I
     stop, I cease to think; my mind works only with
     my legs.

     Jean Jacques Rousseau


Walking and creativity --

     If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking.
    Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.

     Raymond Inmon


     Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.

     J.K. Rowling


Walking and spiritual matters --

     My father considered a walk among the mountains
     as the equivalent of churchgoing.

     Aldous Huxley


     My God is the God of Walkers.  If you walk
     hard enough, you probably don't need any
     other god.

     Bruce Chatwin


Walking and truth --

     Perhaps the truth depends on a walk
     around the lake.

     Wallace Stevens, "It Must be Abstract"


     If you look for the truth outside yourself,
     It gets farther and farther away.
     Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
     It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
     Only if you understand it in this way
     Will you merge with the way things are.

     Tung-Shan


Walking and final notes --

     I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
     Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
     And there I found myself more truly and
     more strange.

     Wallace Stevens, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"

     The sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy;
     walk and be healthy.  The best way to lengthen out
     our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose.

     Charles Dickens