Nature Excerpts

The Carter Family
“Wildwood Flower”

I will twine mid my ringlets of raven black hair
the lilies so pale and the roses so fair
and the myrtle so bright with an emerald hue
the pale amaryllis and violets so blue
I will dance I will sing and my laugh will be gay.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nature"

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.


Patience Taught by Nature
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"And still the generations of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife
With Heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle! Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land, savannah-swards
Unweary sweep, hills watch unworn, and rife
Meek leaves drop year]y from the forest-trees
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass."

Into The Wild
Directed by: Sean Penn
"In 1990, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a college graduate from Emory University, rejects a materialist and conventional life. He destroys all of his credit cards and identification documents, donates nearly his entire savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well-used, but reliable Datsun to experience life in the wilderness."