Nature is a wonderful way to align your attention with your experience. When one is out in green nature, one immediately begins to live life more directly. This is something the transcendentalists of the 19th century knew well, and also considering the new access to ancient texts from India, like the Bhagavad Gita, their fascination with spirituality and nature were somehow intertwined. Emerson and Thoreau are great examples of free spirits who yearned for direct experience. Society, culture, and ideology always have the possibility of turning our lives into indirect experience. Life is experience, and the more directly you experience it, the more fulfilled you shall be.
Here are some select quotes from the works of Emerson on the topic of nature!
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature – Chapter 1, 1836)
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Education)
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Works and Days)
The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature – Chapter 7: Spirit, 1836)
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature – Chapter 3: Beauty, 1836)
But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature – Chapter 1, 1836)
Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature – Chapter 3: Beauty, 1836)
Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature – Chapter 6, 1836)
Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Letters and Social Aims, 1875)
In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Progress of Culture, 1867)
Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Atlantic Monthly – Aspects of Culture, 1867)
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature – Chapter 1, 1836)
Daniel Seeker is a wandering dervish and lifelong student of the past, present and future. He realized that he was made of immaculate and timeless consciousness when meditating in his hermit cave on the island of Gotland. His writings are mostly a reflection of that realizaton. Daniel currently studies history, philosophy, egyptology and western esotericism at Uppsala Universitet. He’s also currently writing his B.A. thesis in history which explores how Buddhist and Hindu texts were first properly translated and introduced to the western world in the late 18th and 19th century.