A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.
Interpretation
A sap run symbolizes the transition from winter to spring, showcasing the balance between warmth and cold.
In this quote, John Burroughs illustrates the beauty of nature's cycles, where the sap run represents the sweet release from winter's grasp, enabled by the harmonious interplay between the sun's warmth and the lingering chill of frost. This transformation not only reflects the physical changes in the environment but serves as a metaphor for renewal and balance in life, inviting us to appreciate the slow but sure changes that lead to growth and vitality.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the beauty of changing seasons.
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.
Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.
Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage.
The philosophy that I have worked under most of my life is that the serious study of natural history is an activity which has far-reaching effects in every aspect of a person's life. It ultimately makes people protective of the environment in a very committed way. It is my opinion that the study of natural history should be the primary avenue for creating environmentalists.
We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.
I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes hills and streams and plains the mountains over our land and nature's wealth deep under the earth are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.
The tints of autumn...a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.
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