Each day brings new possibilities for seeing beauty, which is all around us, in every part of the natural world

The weather is quite delicious. Yesterday, after writing to you, I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half and enjoyed myself--the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as I ever saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed
~ Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin's Letters

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are
~ Joseph Campbell

As we climbed, sunbeams pierced the brume to pick out pools of water in bowls of polished rock and carpets of glistening, emerald ferns. Big trees lay over the narrow ravine, their backs covered in moss. As we rambled higher still, blue sky tinted the fog and, suddenly, we were in warm sun on the golden flanks of Mount Tamalpais
~ Gregory Dicum ... Near the Golden Gate

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all
~ Stanley Horowitz

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved
~ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Our ability to go deeply into silence brings us many benefits. It is when the soul is in dead silence that it is able to go beyond its accumulated sanskars (patterns) and karma and see its original nature clearly. I may have been making overall spiritual effort for a long period of time, but this effort alone would only take me so far. It is when I make the effort to experience dead silence, that I am able to capture the awareness of myself in my original form, the form to which I am returning once again. When I am in this stage, the catching power of the soul is immense and the inner experience is very powerful
~ BK Janki

It's obvious that humans are unlike all animals. It's also obvious that we're a species of big mammal down to the minutest details of our anatomy and o