Learning from the trees, and sky and earth

"Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books."
John Lubbock
 

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher."
William Wordsworth

 

 
"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars."
Walt Whitman
 

 
"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
Henry David Thoreau

"I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets."

Hamlin Garland