The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.
Interpretation
Life encourages us to recognize the power and divinity that lies close at hand, often overlooked.
John Burroughs' quote suggests that we frequently overlook the simple yet profound sources of strength and truth that are available to us in our everyday lives. It serves as a reminder to look closely at our surroundings and circumstances, as they often hold the key to greater understanding and personal empowerment.
In practice
In a motivational speech, one might say: 'Remember, you are always nearer to your true power than you think, as John Burroughs reminds us.'
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.
Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
He who can reach a child's heart can reach the worlds heart.
His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere.
The hard and stiff will be broken. _x000D_ The soft and supple will prevail.
It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.
Gentleness is the antidote for cruelty.
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