Loving Nature Naturally: 092818

"Nature and people are simply part of one another.  If we bring our awareness to what is around us and within us, this becomes obvious.  We cannot be considered separate.  The natural world is at the very heart of our being.  If we are willing to listen and pay attention to nature, we will begin to recognize our innate sense of connection and belonging.  Mindfulness of the natural world will probably be one of our deepest experiences and our greatest opportunities to feel truly alive."

~Claire Thompson

(Mindfulness and the Natural World)

Loving Nature Naturally: 092018

"All of nature offers lessons on living, free of charge. One morning I noticed a dead tree supporting many living things--fungus, vines, lichen--which taught me that even after death we can continue to support those who live on. Living trees on our property teach other lessons. One tree has grown around a barbed wire fence. Another has grown around a nail, and a third through a chain link fence. These trees teach me how to accept irritation, absorb the pain and grow around problems. Nature teaches me how to find my place, grow toward the sunlight and bypass obstacles. To survive, we must be able to change in response to whatever is required by the challenge of the moment. Our bodies know this, but our minds often rebel when change is necessary."

~Bernie S. Siegel

~*~

"A waterfall begins from only one drop of water, sir. 

Look what comes from that..."

P.K. from the film, The Power of One

AOM Meditations: 090418

Farmhouse with Birch Trees (1903) by Gustav Klimt

Thanks to our Friend for sending us this beautiful art

~*~

“When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth.

This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind.”

~John O'Donohue

Loving Nature Naturally: 071618

“I only went out for a walk 

and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, 

for going out, I found, 

was really going in.”

~John Muir 

Loving Nature Naturally: 071018

by Studio MG photography

~*~

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail.

~John Muir

Loving Nature Naturally: 070918

"Nature is the clearest source of solitude. The greatness of nature can overwhelm the insignificant chatter by which we measure most of our days. If you have the wisdom and the courage to go to nature alone, the larger rhythms, the eternal hum, will make itself known all the sooner. When you have found it, it will always be there for you. The peace without will become the peace within, and you will be able to return to it in your heart wherever you find yourself."

~Kent Nerburn 

Loving Nature Naturally: 062018

photography by Eloi Biosca

~*~

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth 

find reserves of strength 

that will endure as long as life lasts. 

There is something infinitely healing 

in the repeated refrains of nature--

the assurance that dawn comes after night, 

and spring after winter.

~Rachel Carson

(Silent Spring)

Rachel is one of my favorite Superheroes

There is an excellent Bio-Doc on NetFlix

About Rachel's life and work

I Highly Recommend it

It's one of those important ones that everyone should see

Loving Nature Naturally: 060518

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles."

~Anne Frank

Loving Nature Naturally: 060418

photo by John Bortolin

~*~

"Nature and people are simply part of one another. If we bring our awareness to what is around us and within us, this becomes obvious. We cannot be considered separate. The natural world is at the very heart of our being. If we are willing to listen and pay attention to nature, we will begin to recognize our innate sense of connection and belonging. Mindfulness of the natural world will probably be one of our deepest experiences and our greatest opportunities to feel truly alive."

~Claire Thompson

(Mindfulness and the Natural World)

AOM Meditations: 052518

The Rhodora Flower (Rhododendron canadense)

Thanks to a Friend of AOM for sending us his favorite poem

~*~

The Rhodora:  On being asked, whence is the flower

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, 

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook. 

The purple petals fallen in the pool

Made the black water with their beauty gay; 

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! 

I never thought to ask; I never knew;

But in my simple ignorance suppose

The self-same power that brought me there, brought you."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

~*~

I added the following quote
To go with my discussion in the Music section.

"Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. ‘I am that I am’ sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words 'Be still’. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that 'I am so and so’. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?"

~Sri Ramana Maharshi

Loving Nature Naturally: 052318

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a 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 

("Childe Harold's Pilgrimage")

Loving Nature Naturally: 052218

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” 

~Henry David Thoreau

(Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

Loving Nature Naturally: 051618

Reflections of Spring - photographer unknown

~*~

"The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity - then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective."

~David Suzuki

~*~

Loving Nature: 051518

by GEMEOS VB Photography

~*~

"The longer I live the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and wonder of the world. . . I have loved the feel of the grass under my feet, and the sound of the running streams by my side.  The hum of the wind in the treetops has always been good music to me, and the face of the fields has often comforted me more than the faces of people.

I am in love with this world. . . I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvest, I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have sown.

I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting if its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings."

~John Burroughs

John Burroughs was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the U.S. conservation movement. The first of his essay collections was Wake-Robin in 1871.

Daily Dose of Naturism: 010218

I go now to the wilderness to be a part of it; 

to accept my place in the world and its place in me; 

to grow into reality as a tree grows into the rain, 

to conform to the Earth 

as a stream conforms to the stones of its bed.  

To live.  To aspire.  To be.

~William Ashworth

Daily Dose of Naturism: 122217

 “Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair and let us huddle together as darkness takes over. We are at home amidst the birds and the trees, for we are children of nature.”

~Susan Polis Schutz 

Daily Dose of Naturism: 121217

photographer unknown

framed by me

~*~

"Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

—John Muir

(Our National Parks)

AOM Meditations: 071717

Church at Noisy Le Roi in Autumn by Alfred Sisley

Thanks to our Friend for sending us this beautiful art

~*~

“All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.”

~Eckhart Tolle

~*~

"What we observe is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." The way we see the world shapes our narrative describing it. Even through the objective lens of science, it is still the human view of the world. If science is the best way we have to avoid being fooled by our perceptions, it still reflects those perceptions. The human touch is in everything we create, science included.

~Werner Karl Heisenberg

~*~