Echoes

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

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.

For those who are awake, there is one common world; but of those who sleep, each turns aside into a private world of his own.

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

A tree as great as a man's embrace grows from a tiny shoot. A terrace nine stories high rises from a handful of earth. A journey of a thousand li begins beneath one's feet.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life — no disgrace, no calamity — which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes.

Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.

But do not ask me where I am going, As I travel in this limitless world, Where every step I take is my home.

Empty mountain — no one in sight, / yet voices of men are heard. / Sun's reflected light enters the deep wood, / shining once more upon green moss.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Traveling offers you a hundred roads to adventure, and gives your heart wings.

I was walking along Tinker Creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world.

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few.

Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

The sun and distant stars appeared to mingle in the perfection of the same natural order, and I felt, in the stillness of the tropical night, how much more alive and near to the heavens was this part of the earth.

I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth's firmness — I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.