What has kept me in the woods all these years is the love of beauty. If I was watching a beaver it was not the beaver and its habits as much as it was the light on the pool, the symmetry of the dam. If I was trailing a deer, it was not so much the habits of the deer as it was the vistas I gained along the ridges and through the trees. If it was ducks, it was more than anything else the view of a flock against the sunset or dawn in the rice rather than the birds themselves. In other words it was the scene as a whole which drew me and that I mistook for a keen interest in natural history for lack of a better explanation.
      - Sigurd Olson as quoted in David Backes biography, A Wilderness Within, The Life of Sigurd F. Olson

If I knew all there is to know about a golden arctic poppy growing on a rocky ledge in the Far North, I would know the whole story of evolution and creation.
     - Sigurd F. Olson, Reflections from the North Country

. . .

On Sundays, I like to find a particularly beautiful place in the woods and sit and meditate for an hour. Sometimes I get important messages. Yesterday, I got a couple, including a suggestion to revisit the work of Sigurd Olson. I spent the morning today doing that. It was truly wonderful. One of the videos I came across in that research was the following.

A Private Wilderness: The Journals of Sigurd F Olson (Book Launch)

. . .

The page above is from the first draft of a new book I’m working on:

Meditations On Nature: The Beauty Of Wild Places