New places offer more than geographical change. They also offer a mental distance from the recent past that allows you to get your life in perpective.
-Sarah Harrell Banks
To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but not hurried.
-George Santayana
The need is not for humanity to learn to manage for the planet, which can manage quite well without us. The need is for humanity to learn to manage itself.
-Robert C. Cowen
What are the environmental problems in your area? What’s being done about them? How are local people encouraged or required to minimize their effect on this planet?
It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural and uncultivated state, was… to be the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE.
-Thomas Paine
Agrarian Justice
Mountains are the scribblings of time on the surface of the land…. Here man does not matter, does not count…The steam, the trout, the mountains, go on with or without me, dancing, as they have for so long, to time’s madder music-rhythms older than interstellar dust.
-Harry Middleton
On the Spine of Time: An Angler’s Love of the Smokies
Have you ever felt you were just another part of nature? Or, in Middleton’s words, “just another expression of life, neither feared, envied, acknowledged, or especially needed?”
You might have been on a river, lake, or ocean, or in mountains, woods, a desert, or open fields. Or perhaps you were caught in severe weather. Describe the experience.
Each of us is a biography, a story… Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives, we are each of us unique.
-Oliver Sacks
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
To have one’s individual completely ignored is like being pushed quite out of life. Like being blown out as one blows out a light.
-Evelyn Scott
Has anyone ever caused you to feel as if you weren’t even there, as if your needs or wishes or plans didn’t even exist? How can each of us make sure we don’t treat another person like that?
The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned: freedom, from intrusion. He needs a little privacy quite as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.
-Phyllis McGinley
Each of us needs a different amount of this freedom. This difference often causes misunderstandings between friends, spouses, parents and children, and even teachers and students. What experience have you had with “freedom from intrusion”? How can people come to better understand and respect each other;s need for privacy?
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life, sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostilities.
-Henry Wadsowrth Longfellow
Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
-Paul Tillich
The Eternal Now
…Nothing, nothing, nothing, is worthwhile when we have to do it all alone.
-Kathleen Norris
Hands Full of Living
There are no precedents: You are the first you that ever was.
-Christopher Morley
Inward Ho
We are each so much more than what some reduce to measuring.
-Karen Kaiser Clark
Once you label me, you negate me.
-Soren Kierkegard