To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen.

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

Any river is really the summation of a whole valley. It shapes not only the land but the life and even the culture of that valley. To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it.

All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.

No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.

For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.