Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature

Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.
Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions.” 
― Lorraine Anderson, Sisters of the Earth: 

Crossroads: Parting of a Friend

* this poem dedicated to Kelly Kytola

A tear comes to mind, when I think of you
And remember the time when our friendship was new.
A gentle smile centered on your face,
And I knew that then was the time and place,
To kiss you, I did and felt a tick back in my heart.
I thought we'd be forever and never part,
But now we have come to a fork in the road,
Where we must no longer carry each other's load,
Let the burden off our shoulders and not leave a scar,
For the paths we are taking are very far apart.
I will remember always the places we went,
And cherish forever the time we've spent.
So now is the time where I say goodbye,
Spend one last minute lost in your eyes.
As much as I know that we can't stay,
I hope our paths will cross again some other day.

-Derek del Barrio 

Love for nature

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more” 
― George Gordon

 “Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.” 
― John Lubbock

 “...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” 
― Vincent van Gogh

“The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.” 
― Willa Cather, My Antonia

Byron