He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.
Interpretation
Appreciating nature's beauty in all seasons enriches life.
John Burroughs suggests that those who find beauty in the summer should also seek and appreciate the wonder of winter. This quote emphasizes that each season has its unique charm and significance, encouraging us to embrace the changing aspects of nature and to develop a deeper appreciation for the world around us throughout the year.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a nature appreciation workshop to inspire participants.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth β these are one and the same fight.
There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets.
White in the moon the long road lies.
What is more gentle than a wind is summer?
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)β¦ Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.
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