Fall of the year and of our time of Thanksgiving call us to thoughts not only of gratitude but of its source--the planet that is our sustaining Mother, and of what we owe to it. Thoreau's first speech to the Concord Lyceum began with the words "I would speak a word for Nature..." Today let's fathom what this means, going perhaps more deeply than usual in our awareness of that bond. Journal, February 1851 -- Henry David Thoreau For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. Won't you join us as we take a walk in the woods?
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