I’d lie on my back on a patch of moss watching a swaying poplar’s branches interlace with another’s, and the tremulous leaves vibrate, and the clouds forgather to parade zoologically overhead, and felt linked to the whole matrix, as you either do or you don’t through the rest of your life. And childhood—nine or ten, I think—is when this best happens. It’s when you develop a capacity for quiet, a confidence in your solitude, your rapport with a Nature both animate and not much so.

Edward Hoagland, “Small Silences: Listening for the Lessons of Nature”

Forests

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

John Muir

Mountains

Send me to the mountains

Let me go free forever

I’ll be running through the forest

Dancing in the fields like this

Lord Huron, “Long Lost”

Coasts

A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Freshwater

Die if I must, let my bones turn to dust,

I’m the lord of the lake and I don’t want to leave it

All who sail off the coast evermore

Will remember the sight of the ghost on the shore

Lord Huron, “The Ghost on the Shore”

Horizons

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Wildlife

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a thousand miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

Love what it loves.

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”