The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Nothing truly wild is unclean.

Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.

…and she would wonder if one can truly stop the inevitable. Was it as Ada had suggested, that we can choose our own endings, joy over sorrow? Or does the cruel world just give and...

The contemplative man always lives alone. Regardless of who may reside in his home, his is a solitary world.

sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically...

It’s mostly during times of wilderness experience, that people are willing to accept the lessonsthat wisdom teaches

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression… We have yet to become fluent in the...

And we were taught to play golf. Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble,...

In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as...

It is crucial that Jesus is led by the Spirit. There are two wildernesses, two darknesses in the spiritual journey. One you go into by your own stupidity, by your sin, blindness, ignorance and mistakes....

Some people hear the voice of God in their dreams or through prayer or meditation. For me, God is truly in the details—the details found in the connections between the living things on the planet...

I think people who don’t know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And...

Every falling leaf reminds me that I too will soon be separated from these trees. Trying to capture freedom is like trying to catch a falling leaf. Occasionally you may grab one out of the...

In our forestspart divineand makes her heart palpitatewild and tame are one. What a delicious Sound!

In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have...

There’s been a lot to get used to here.” Esther laughed. “Isn’t that the truth. I don’t know if you ever get used to it really. It just gets in your blood so that you...

Only lost photographs that were never taken know what my mind speaks of when we are alone together.

In the dry places, men begin to dream, wrote Wright Morris, who grew up north of here, in Nebraska. Where rivers run sand, something in man begins to flow. I thought I knew exactly what...

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I...

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something...

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild,...

At most, a hundred paces separated him from them. The powerful beast, seeing the riders and horses, rose on his fore paws and began to gaze at them. The sun, which now stood low, illuminated...

The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get...

Not only did Jesus purposefully enter the wilderness on a regular basis but historically, God seems to prefer meeting with man in these desert regions.

There was a wildness inside him; someday he would capture it. Not to be tamed, but to be released. For only by understanding his mind could it be freed.

Sometimes when you lose your way, you find YOURSELF.

Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It’s the great, big, broad land ‘way up yonder,It’s the forests where silence has lease;It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,It’s...

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.

It has always been my understanding that truth and freedom can only exist in wild places.

James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store...

Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It’s just about as remote as any tourist destination...

And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all,...

Wildness is the preservation of the World.

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

Keep calm. You have the forest in your blood.

Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a ‘Jurassic Park’ disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most...

He watched the desert slip under the airship’s nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain – dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world...

…returning to nature has been a dream present in the minds of every generation since mankind first left nature.

We walk alone in the wilderness.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river’s edge; around them eight hundred species...

We are the wilderness withinScreaming out for true expression.Even when we’re sleeping,There’s no escape from this obsession.

flavor of the wilds.

…William Stegner…coined the term ‘the geography of hope,’ countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few...

Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex...

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

Have faith my friends, because love will find you eventually. It found me, and I was wearing camouflage clothing, face paint, and cologne that smelled like the wilderness.

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our...