The World (Wide Web) is Not Enough.

I just spent four hours offline—one of only, say, two or three times I’ve spent so long away from the computer in two years during waking hours.

{My mission, my dreams, my livelihood are now all anchored online, and I’m ambitious to fulfill all three after “wasting” six years building up a national magazine, only to discover, the hard way, that there is no such thing as eco-responsible distribution}

Other than the stress of knowing elephant journal’s readership was to decline with every half hour I failed to post to our twitter and facebook accounts, and failed to edit and publish new articles via our many writers…it was relaxing. My dog and I reconnected after a few months apart, when he spent most of his time with a ladypal and her dog. We ran (and cycled) about town, never going more than a half hour without jumping in the creek.

It took that long, four hours, for the sun and children and community and cyclists and random friends and water to awaken my mind from the two-dimensional world of the internet. The information age has soaked my brain in second-hand electricity. It took that long for the world to begin to seem multi-dimensional and real, in an unreal way, again.

And so, above, I post a perhaps ”

The Most Representative Romantic Painting » Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.”

…A painting I’ve loved since my days in college.

And so, below, I offer a few quotes I’ve found from Henry David Thoreau, who regarded Nature as God, and vice versa, and urged us to care for the one as we would love the other.

What are your favorite nature quotes? Leave one in comments, below, and enrich all who read this.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

Henry David Thoreau