I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
Interpretation
Nature provides comfort and restoration to the soul, bringing clarity and peace.
This quote by John Burroughs emphasizes the healing and restorative power of nature. It suggests that immersing oneself in the natural world can help calm the mind, repair emotional wounds, and bring a sense of balance and order to one's senses, highlighting a profound connection between humans and the environment.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a speech about the benefits of spending time outdoors.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience.
I want us to know our world. If I lived in North Georgia on up through the Appalachians, I would be just as crazy about the mountain laurel as I am about [Texas] bluebonnets.
Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon be in trouble.
All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature.
The public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for it's bloom, or it's garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and pot-herbs.
The tints of autumn...a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.
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