nature

Photographer: Gary Vestal

~::~::~::~

I have learned to look on nature . . . [as] a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man: a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.

Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains; and of all that we behold from this green earth . . . well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul, of all my moral being.

William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey 1798