I can still smell the green of the grass crushed beneath me. Feel the damp of the dew on my elbows. Hear the birdsong. – Kristina Turner, The Self-Healing Cookbook, 2002, originally published 1987

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live. – Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Progress of Culture”