Thoreau
August 23
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and Other Natural History Essays |
 Henry David Thoreau American Writer  Yellow Shafted Northern Flicker on an Old Snag with Nesting Holes  Rocks, Trees, Moss  Walden  Thumbing Through Thoreau A Book of Quotations by Henry David Thoreau  On The Study Of Words by Richard C. Trench  Thoreau the Land Surveyor  Walden Kindle Edition  The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau  Walden, or Life in the Woods Poster  Kindle 6" Display, U.S. & International Wireless |
Live
in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste
the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be
your only diet drink and botanical medicines. In August live on berries, not dried meats and pemmican, as if you were on shipboard making your way through a waste ocean, or in a northern desert.
Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each season's influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your especial use. The vials of summer never made a man sick, but those which he stored in his cellar. Drink the wines not of you bottling, but of Nature's bottling; not kept in goat-skins or pig-skins, but the skins of a myriad fair berries. Let Nature do your bottling and your pickling and preserving. For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick. Men have discovered - or think they have discovered - the salutariness of a few wild things only, and not of all nature. Why, "nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health. Some men think that they are not well in spring, or summer, or autumn, or winter; it is only because they are not well in them. 1853 Other Entries |