“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau – Walden (1854)
This is the God or nature of Spinoza:
“God would have said:
Stop praying and punching yourself in the chest!What I want you to do is go out into the world and enjoy your life.I want you to enjoy, sing, have fun and enjoy everything I’ve made for you.Stop going to those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and say they are my house!My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That’s where I live and there I express my love for you.Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing!Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don’t blame me for everything they made you believe.Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can’t read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son’s eyes…you will find me in no book!Trust me and stop asking me. Will you tell me how to do my job?Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you, I criticize you, nor get angry, or bother, or punishment. I am pure love.Stop asking for forgiveness, there’s nothing to forgive. If I made you… I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies… free will. How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How can I punish you for being the way you are, if I’m the one who made you Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity?What kind of god can do that?Forget any kind of commandments, any kind of laws; those are wiles to manipulate you, to control you, that only create guilt in you.Respect your peers and don’t do what you don’t want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert is your guide.My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step, not a step in the way, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now and all you need.I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.You are absolutely free to create in your life heaven or hell.I could tell you if there’s anything after this life but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is no. As if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.So, if there’s nothing, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, rest assured that I won’t ask if you behaved right or wrong, I’ll ask. Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?…Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don’t want you to believe in me, I want you to feel in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.Stop praising me, what kind of egomaniac God do you think I am?I’m bored being praised, I’m tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of you, your health, your relationships, the world. Feeling looked at, shocked?… Express your joy! That’s the way to praise me.Stop complicating things and repeating as a parakeet what you’ve been taught about me.The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations?
look for me outside, you won’t find me. Find me inside… there I am beating on you.”-Spinoza
“Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone,
with not a single friend,
for they are all smilers and talkers
and therefore unsuitable.
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree.
I have my ways of praying,
as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone
I can become invisible.
I can sit on the top of a dune
as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned.
I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me,
I must love you very much.”-Mary Oliver
“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…. what business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
-Henry David Thoreau
“Trees are poems that Earth writes upon the sky.”
-Kahlil Gibran
“Go outside and don’t go to a special place. Just go into your neighborhood and repeatedly, over and over again, open your ears and harvest the sounds all around you. Whether those are tree sounds or car sounds or bird sounds. Without judgment, just be present for the physical experience of sounds flowing into our consciousness. Do that over and over again and the trees will befriend you — or come into your consciousness and teach you some of what they’re saying.”
-David George Haskell
“Come to the woods, for here is rest.” -John Muir
“When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, …and the doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?”
– Seneca
“Going to the woods is going home.”
-John Muir
“My roots are in the depths of the woods.”
– Galle
To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.”
– Mikhail Gorbachev
