I found Esau's field guide at the bottom of my pack. Taking a candle into the bedroom, I read his book until my eyes grew heavy. From his vast notes, it seemed that almost every plant and tree in the...

Wildness in animals is a curious thing to us humans. Isn't that why people watch Animal Planet? Escape. Maybe that's why we watch. Animal behavior is elemental. It takes us back to a simpler time.

Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites

But the trees were gorgeous in their autumnal leafiness - the warm odours of flowers and herb came sweet upon the sense.

In the sense of movement a boat is a living thing

vigorous walking in natural surroundings

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.

Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky....

It was too wet to see the sun go down, too grey to see the moon come up.

Yes, just forget that there are human beings, suffering, tested, a thousand times angered hearts! And return to where you came from, into the arms of nature, the wandering, tranquil, and beautiful.

Summer's heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in its turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone.

There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories....

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you...

It was the adventure that called to his soul. All those years riding across open country as he hunted down the men who had killed his parents were not so easily forgotten. He loved the feel of the...

The bush is not merely a holiday destination; it's where you learn how insignificant you truly are.

LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia's time, the sun having slipped below her horizon, it was morning in the San Diego, California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by the sea, or rather...

Sometimes I catch myself staring at the sea and forget my tasks. It seems large enough to contain anything that people might feel.

The sky drops silver threads of sleet.

Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us. Wanting more is to lose this and to be unhappy.

It was a spring day, one of those that bring hope: full of gentle breezes and delicate aromas of heated earth.

The area was home to wolves, elk, deer, bears, outlaws, and anyone seeking solitude, such as the monks of the Winds Abbey.

Loafe with me on the grass - loose the stop from your throat; Not words, not music or rhyme I want - not custom or lecture, not even the best; Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide and this is the wonder that's keeping the...

A single farm house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape...

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,...

Dawn unlocked the morning in increments of gray.

Dappled sunshine shivers.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that truly move the world are invisible.

Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening and sensing. Her face turned, slightly, after each new sensation, alert. Her tail moved, in another...

Now the western tempest was scrawled all over with lines of intolerable light, while the inky head of the cloud - giant to the east was continually suffused with a white and deadly glow that came and...