When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.
Interpretation
This quote symbolizes harmony and balance in nature through the bluebird's colors.
John Burroughs reflects on the beauty and symmetry in nature, suggesting that the bluebird's coloration serves as a bridge between the sky and the earth. The blue on its back represents the heavens, while the warm hues on its breast connect it to the earth, illustrating the interconnectedness of all elements of the natural world.
In practice
During a nature conservation seminar to emphasize the beauty of biodiversity.
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.
We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can't see the stars at night.
I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.
The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.
When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.
... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.
For this lovely bowl let us arrange these flowers since there is no rice.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.