A Quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest.
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So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest so gently, that we go, Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, Being too full of sleep to understand How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, Leads by the hand her little child to bed, Half willing, half reluctant to be led, And leave his broken playthings on the floor. Still gazing at them through the open door, Nor wholly reassured and comforted By promises of others in their stead Which, the more splendid, may not please him more; So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest so gently, that we go Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, Being too full of sleep to understand How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
God is kind, but he is not soft. He takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life change.
Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.
It is fear which leads us to war, ... It is fear which leads us to believe that we must kill or be killed. Fear which leads us to attack those who have not attacked us. Fear which leads us to ring our nation in the very heavens with weapons of mass destruction.
Most of us have become Ecozombies, desensitized, environmental deadheads. On average, society conditions us to spend over 95% of our time and 99.9% of our thinking disconnected from nature. Nature's extreme absence in our lives leaves us abandoned and wanting. We feel we never have enough. We greedily, destructively, consume and, can't stop. Nature's loss in our psyche produces a hurt, hungering, void within us that bullies us into our dilemmas.
I try to avoid giving advice. The only advice I will give is to pay attention. I don't mean to the screen in your hand. I'm talking about the natural world. I spent a lot of time educating my children about nature by putting them in nature. I said, "I want you to listen; I want you to look." There's so much technology coming into our lives that takes us away from the natural stuff, so I'm pushing the other way.
The realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of our nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination.
You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.
Ya know it's funny, what's happening to us. Our lives have become digital. Our friends, now virtual. And, anything you could ever wanna know is just a click away. Experiencing the world through second hand information isn't enough. If we want authenticity we have to initiate it. We will never know our full potential unless we push ourselves to find it. It's this self-discovery that inevitably takes us to the wildest places on earth.
Voices of the glorified urge us onward. They who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call upon us to advance. The rest that awaits us invites us forward. We do not pine for our rest before God wills it. We long for no inglorious rest. We are thankful rather for the invaluable training of difficulty, the loving discipline of danger and strife. Yet in the midst of it all the prospect of rest invites us heavenward. Through all, and above all, God cries, "Go forward!" "Come up higher!
Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must. It is not our judgment that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us. It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it, and ask not whither?
Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.
Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.
To our way of thinking the Indians' symbol is the circle, the hoop. Nature wants to be round. The bodies of human beings and animals have no corners. With us, the circle stands for togetherness of people who sit with one another around the campfire, relatives and friends united in peace while the sacred pipe passes from hand to hand. To us this is beautiful and fitting, symbol and reality at the same time, expressing the harmony of life and nature.
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