I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and found it good... I love a small house, plain clothes, simple living. Many persons know the luxury of a skin bath- a plunge in the pool or the wave unhampered by clothing. That is the simple life - direct and immediate contact with things, life with the false wrappings torn away - the fine house, the fine equipage, the expensive habits, all cut off. How free one feels, how good the elements taste, how close one gets to them, how they fit one's body and one's soul! To see the fire that warms you, or better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst, and to dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are the stay of your four walls, and the timbers that uphold the roof that shelters you; to be in direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to want no extras, no shields; to find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more satisfying than a gift of tropic fruit; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
From: "An Outlook Upon Life" quoted in Our Friend John Burroughs (Clara Barrus, 1914).
The current of the lives of many persons, I think, is like a muddy stream. They lack the instinct for health, and hence do not know when the vital current is foul. They are never really well ... The dew on the grass, the bloom on the grape, the sheen on the plumage, are suggestions of the health that is within the reach of most of us.
I would live so that I could get tipsy on a glass of water, or find the spur in a whiff of morning air.
You and I perish, but something goes out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of humanity.
Oh, the wisdom that grows on trees, that murmurs in the streams, that floats in the wind, that sings in the birds, that is fragrant in the flowers, that speaks in the storms - the wisdom that one gathers on the shore, or when sauntering in the fields, or in resting under a tree, the wisdom that makes him forget his science, and exacts only his love - how precious it all is!
Naturalism does not see two immeasurable realities, God and Nature, it sees only one, that all is Nature or all is God, just as you prefer ... The universe was not made, it is, and always has been. God is Nature, and Nature is God.
I shall not be imprisoned in the grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos.
We are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate material from what we call the spiritual ... Each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind, as is every beast of the field and jungle, and every fowl of the air, and every insect that creeps and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an end in itself ... [Humanity] is a link in an endless chain of being (Accepting the Universe, 1920).
All quotes above from: Meditations of John Burroughs: Nature is Home. Chris Highland (Ed), Self-published, 2007.
