I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.
One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.
Wonder is a bulky emotion. When you let it fill your heart and mind, there isn't room for anxiety, distress or anything else.
We are defined by how we place our attention.
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Ecstasy is what everyone craves - not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless.
There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.
We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.
One can live at a low flame. Most people do. For some, life is an exercise in moderation (best china saved for special occasions), but given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.
And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.
Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.
In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time's continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world's ordinary miracles. No mind or heart hobbles. No analyzing or explaining. No questing for logic. No promises. No goals. No relationships. No worry. One is completely open to whatever drama may unfold.
American writer 1803-1882 Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.
Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
[On gardens:] I think they're sanctuaries for the mind and spirit. ... It's easy to feel wonder-struck in a garden, especially if you cultivate delight.
Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.
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