“The natural world is not separate from us, it is part of us.”
“There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy.”
Nature and the Serious Business of Joy
“We need nature — water, sun, air — to survive, but she doesn’t really need us. She is generous to us, but she has some conditions, and we have to respect them.”
Water: A Stunning Celebration of the Element of Life Based on Indian Folklore
“Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.”
“A self-directed enjoyment of nature seems to me to be something forced. More naturally, as well as more properly, we take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.”
Iris Murdoch , The Sovereignty of Good, 1970
”The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.
[…]
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
Walt Whitman on What Makes Life Worth Living
Nature Journaling – John Muir Laws
For each thing you record, note these three things:
Awareness: “I see…”: You notice something, draw a picture of it, make notes about it
Creativity: “It reminds me of…”: You consciously seek out analogies to what you’ve seen and make notes about those
Curiosity: “I wonder…”: You ask questions or create hypotheses about what you’ve seen.
As an additional stimulus, Laws suggests making three kinds of notes on every page: drawings, words (descriptions), and numbers (measurements). That helps engage a wider range of your brain’s abilities and contributes to the awakening of awareness, creativity, and curiosity.
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