As I take my daily walks along the river, framed by fragrant eucalyptus trees, I wonder what I would do without this escape hatch, my decompression chamber from the stresses of daily life. I feel in better balance when I return from my walks.

F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently said, “And after reading [Henry David] Thoreau, I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.”

Yes, the famous essayist, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau not only loved nature; he also believed it is an important part of our human experience here on Earth. Thoreau left us a rich legacy of works about life, freedom, and nature.

Here are just a few of my favorite Thoreau quotes about nature:

“I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.”

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

“He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”

“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”

Photos courtesy Frank Cone, Pexels

Rejuvenate | With nature © Susan L Hart 2019 | Hart Haiku