Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.

As well expect Nature to answer your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair.

Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.

The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter woods.

If gardeners will forget a little the phrase, "watering the plants" and think of watering as a matter of "watering the earth" under the plants, keeping up its moisture content and gauging its need, the garden will get on very well.

Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself.