Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of appreciating and respecting the natural world around us.
Henry Beston's quote encourages a deep connection and reverence for the Earth and its diverse landscapes. It suggests that by engaging with and loving nature—its plains, valleys, hills, and seas—we can find peace and solace, allowing our spirits to rest in the beauty of solitude offered by the natural world. This connection fosters a sense of responsibility for preserving the environment and appreciating its gifts.
In practice
This quote can be shared during Earth Day celebrations to inspire appreciation for the planet.
If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make everything 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.
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.
The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter woods.
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.
When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it.
We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact, too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.
Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.
The _x000D_ Earth would die_x000D_ If the sun stopped kissing her.
In nature there is no such thing as waste. In nature nothing is wasted; everything is recycled.
The recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster.
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