Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland. English Standard Version Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Berean Study Bible Behold, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert. King James Bible Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?
I will even make a road in the wilderness And rivers in the desert. I will even make a roadway in the wilderness, Rivers in the desert. I will even put a road in the wilderness, Rivers in the desert. Christian Standard Bible Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert. American Standard Version Behold, I will do a new thing; now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it? Aramaic Bible in Plain English Behold, I make a new thing, and now it will sprout and you shall know it, and I shall make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert Brenton Septuagint Translation Behold, I will do new things, which shall presently spring forth, and ye shall know them: and I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the dry land.
Contemporary English Version I am creating something new. There it is! Do you see it? I have put roads in deserts, streams in thirsty lands.
Do you see it? I have put roads in deserts, streams in thirsty lands. I will even make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the waste. Behold I do new things, and now they shall spring forth, verily you shall know them: I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. Now you will grow like a new plant. Surely you know this is true. I will even make a road in the desert, and rivers will flow through that dry land.
Watch, I am about to do a new thing. Now it will spring up. Indeed I will make a road in the wilderness. In the wasteland I will make rivers. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Look at the new thing I am going to do.
Behold, I do a new thing: now shall it come forth: shall you not know it? I will even make a way in the desert, and floods in the wilderness. I am going to do something new. It is already happening. I will clear a way in the desert. I will make rivers on dry land. Watch for the new thing I am going to do. It is happening already—you can see it now! I will make a road through the wilderness and give you streams of water there. I will make a road in the desert. I will make rivers in the dry land.
Behold, I will do a new thing; it shall come to light quickly; shall ye not know it? I will again make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The heavens declare God's glory and the magnificence of what made them. Each new dawn is a miracle; each new sky fills with beauty. Their testimony speaks into the whole world and reaches to the ends of the earth. The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children. Those who have the humility of a child may find again the key to reference for, and kinship with, all life.
Allen Boone American writer. There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.
A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food -- in some, a plant. The green substance of the earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants.
Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood. Swift or smooth, broad as the Hudson or narrow enough to scrape your gunwales, every river is a world of its own, unique in pattern and personality.
Each mile on a river will take you further from home than a hundred miles on a road. Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America.
Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness. Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton.
America developed its mettle at the muddy gaps of the Cumberlands, in the swift rapids of its rivers, on the limitless reaches of its western plains, in the silent vastness of primeval forests, and in the blizzard-ridden passes of the Rockies and Coast ranges. If we lose wilderness, we lose forever the knowledge of what the world was and what it might, with understanding and loving husbandry, yet become. These are islands in time -- with nothing to date them on the calendar of mankind.
In these areas it is as though a person were looking backward into the ages and forward untold years. Here are bits of eternity, which have a preciousness beyond all accounting. To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage. I'm not against civilization, technology, or science. I just want us to use them well.
We haven't learned to do that yet. There is not as much wilderness out there as I wish there were. There is more inside than you think. Do not feed children on a maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature. Let their souls drink in all that is pure and sweet. Rear them, if possible, amid pleasant surroundings Let nature teach them the lessons of good and proper living, combined with an abundance of well-balanced nourishment.
Those children will grow to be the best men and women. Put the best in them by contact with the best outside. They will absorb it as a plant absorbs the sunshine and the dew. Make no little plans, they have no power to stir men's souls. I am in love with this world. I have nestled lovingly in it. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.
The beauty of nature includes all that is called beautiful, as its flower, and all that is not called beautiful, as its stalk and roots. Indeed, when I go to the woods or the fields, or a send to the hilltop, I do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be breathing it like the air.
I am not dazzled or astonished; I am in no hurry to look lest it be gone. I would not have the litter and debris removed, or at the bands trimmed, or the ground painted. What I enjoy is commensurate with the earth and sky itself. It clings to the rocks and trees; it is kindred to the roughness and savagery; it arises from every tangle and chasm; it perches on the dry oakstubs with the hawks and buzzards; the crows shed it from their wings and weave it in to their nests of coarse sticks; the fox barks it, the cattle low it, and every mountain path leads to its haunts.
I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it. It is is not an adornment; its roots strike to the centre of the earth. See one promontory said Socrates of old , one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all. If we are to have broad-thinking men and women of high mentality, of good physique and with a true perspective on life, we must allow our populace a communion with nature in areas of more or less wilderness condition.
There is a limit to the number of lands of shoreline on the lakes; there is a limit to the number of lakes in existence; there is a limit to the mountainous area of the world, and Our newly found capacity for dealing mass death has us to overlook momentarily the more gentle sciences which underwrite life and affect the survival of man as surely as does the atom.
In the last analysis, we know and do in conservation We believe that ugliness begets ugliness and that nature's beauty, once destroyed, may never be restored by the artifice of man. I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous.
Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blends becomes as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerettes at the center, become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with a squirrel! Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter. The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea, and sky and their amazing life.
To prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves. The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life.
Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. Now I hear the sea sounds about me; the night high tide is rising, swirling with a confused rush of waters against the rocks below The earth's vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals.
Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place. Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature's varied forms.
The land belongs to the future How many names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while. The forest stretched no living man knew how far.
That was the dead, sealed world of the vegetable kingdom, and uncharted continent with interlocking trees, living, dead, half-dead, their roots in bogs and swamps, strangling each other in a slow agony that had lasted for centuries. The forest was suffocation, annihilation.
Four in their hearts doth Nature stirred them so, Then people long on pilgrimage to go, and palmers to be seeding foreign strands, Two distant shrines renowned in sundry lands. Michael Astroff says that forests are the ornaments of the earth, that they teach mankind to understand beauty and attune his mind to lofty sentiments.
Forests temper a stern climate, and in countries where the climate is milder, less strength is wasted in the battle with nature, and the people are kind and gentle. Ordinarily the demands of utility are imperative and scenic beauty where it stands in the way must yield. The great purpose is to set aside a reasonable part of the vanishing wilderness, to make certain that generations of Americans yet unborn will know what it is to experience life on undeveloped, unoccupied land in the same form and character as the Creator fashioned it It is a great spiritual experience.
I never knew a man who took a bedroll into an Idaho mountainside and slept there under a star-studded summer sky who felt self-important that next morning.
Unless we preserve some opportunity for future generations to have the same experience, we shall have dishonored our trust. Believe one who knows; you will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. Bernard de Clairvaux French abbott and primary builder of the Cistercian monastic order. Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up, as did men of another age, to the challenge of nature.
Modern man lives in a highly synthetic kind of existence. He specializes in this and that. Rarely does he test all his powers or find himself whole.
But in the hills and on the water the character of a man comes out. The size of the parcel of land matters less than the relationship of the people to it.
Every particle of every thing rocks, water, flour, human has been in the same place flaming in the heart of our ancient sun before the earth came flying out of it. The irises in your eyes the tissue of roses the slow giant rocks in mountainheads were all born flaming locked in the sun as it drifted like a light on dark water. Parks are at the center of a community's character; they reflect and strengthen the sense of place and identity that makes cities fit places for people. What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset. There can be no greater moral obligation in the environmental field than to ease out the living space and replace dereliction by beauty. To the extent that we create or maintain beauty through an ordered diversity, we will also enhance the stability, health, and productivity of America.
Dasmann Ecologist and essayist. You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.
There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know. That wonderful world of high mountains, dazzling in their rock and ice, acts as a catalyst. It suggests the infinite but it is not the infinite. The heights only give us what we ourselves bring them. The progressive impairment of the parks by budgetary bloodletting is a national disgrace.
To no one's landscape, to feel in sympathy with it, is often to be at peace with life. When all of the world seems wrong and the burdens overwhelming he can look out on the familiar fields and hills or get among them and give way to their beauties of form and color as a resource within himself that will be an ever-present power of recuperation.
Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars, and the hills Being in tune with the universe is the entire secrets. Douglas U. Supreme Court Justice. The concept of public welfare is broad and inclusive The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary.
It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live. Supreme Court Justice , The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains [of the Brooks Range in Alaska] make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond.
The call is that of a wilderness known only to a few This last American wilderness must remain sacrosanct. The wilderness is a place of rest -- not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance. The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments.
It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind. The tallgrass prairie dazzles the eye with an unending array of blooming plants, and this spectacle, with some seventeen new species coming into bloom each week, lasts from March until October.
The tallgrasses themselves, big bluestem, indiangrass, switchgrass, and cordgrass, to name the common ones, are the most powerful, the most expansive, the most majestic of all the prairie plants; they are the redwoods of the prairie.
There is no more new frontier, we have got to make it here. When all the dangerous cliffs are fenced off, all the trees that might fall on people are cut down,all of the insects that bite are poisoned Rather, the safety will have destroyed the wilderness. Yorke Edwards. Dandelions are the supreme symbol of the failure of human control, a yellow flag of mockery, and every time we burned that flag, back it comes, stronger than ever.
No plants or animal is as obstinately perverse in its flaunting of human wishes. The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion at the cradle of true art and true science.
He who knows it not is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle… -- Albert Einstein. We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
Sometimes the rarer, the beautiful can only emerge or survive in isolation. In a similar manner, some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, and unexpected. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Eliot American poet, dramatist, and literary critic.
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children? Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beheath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
And I saw the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. Land is immortal, for its harbors the mysteries of creation. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by the regular contact with outdoor growths -- animals, trees, sun warmth, and free skies -- or it will dwindle and pale.
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light. The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more. The earth laughs in flowers. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back. No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man owns land, the land owns him.
Now let him leave home, if he dare. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds have no title. Plants are the young of the world. Vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect man, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. We consider species to be like a brick in the foundation of a building. You can probably lose one or two or a dozen bricks and still have a standing house. But by the time you've lost 20 per cent of species, you're going to destabilize the entire structure. That's the way ecosystems work. Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things.
Awakened people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good flammable stuff, it will catch fire. The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God…I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles. The creation of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete counterpart in the establishment of "reservations" and "nature-parks.
The "reservation" is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else; there everything make grow and spread as it pleases, including what is it useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroachment of the reality-principle. The survival of the human species is inescapably linked with the survival of all other forms of life. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step and trodden black.
Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. The land was ours before Acceptance is the art of making the obstacle the path. Every single story ramps up the intensity and you finish this section of the book feeling really disheartened. You might also feel a bit superior. But the moment you start to think that you would never behave like these Israelites, the stories have worked their magic.
The wilderness rebellion stories function like a cartoon caricature drawing, the kind you can get at a street fair. The artist looks at your face, takes individual features of your actual appearance, and then magnifies them all out of proportion. Including you. Remember Abraham, who wandered through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land? In contrast, the people of Israel had more than just divine promises to rely upon.
They witnessed the ten plagues and the defeat of Pharaoh in the sea. Yet, these memories quickly faded in the face of hunger, thirst, and an uncertain future. Welcome to the human condition.
We forget to remember. We forget who we really are and who God has been for us. These stories are an honest portrayal of how you and I actually relate to God in the midst of difficult circumstances. Unbeknownst to Israel, up in the hills, God is turning the anger and hostility of their enemies into blessings and hope.
It's about the strange and wonderful way that God is going to accomplish his covenant promise to Abraham, to restore divine blessing to all the nations. Allow these narratives to prod you towards a new and deeper level of trust as you journey through your own wilderness.