He Who Travels West Travels

Autumn Is The Eternal Corrective. It Is Ripeness And Color And A Time Of Maturity; But It Is Also Breadth, And Depth, And Distance. What Man Can Stand With Autumn On A Hilltop And Fail To See The Span Of His World And The Meaning Of The Rolling Hills That Reach To The Far Horizon?

Some People Are Like Ants. Give Them A Warm Day And A Piece Of Ground And They Start Digging. There The Similarity Ends. Ants Keepon Digging. Most People Don't. They Establish Contact With The Soil, Absorb So Much Vernal Vigor That They Can't Stay In One Place, And Desert The Fork Or Spade To See How The Rhubarb Is Coming And Whether The Asparagus Is Yet In Sight.

Of All The Everyday Plants Of The Earth, Grass Is The Least Pretentious And The Most Important To Mankind. It Clothes The Earth Is An Unmistakable Way. Directly Or Indirectly It Provides The Bulk Of Man's Food, His Meat, His Bread, Every Scrap Of His Cereal Diet. Without Grass We Would All Starve, We And All Our Animals. And What A Dismal Place This World Would Be!

In A Painful Time Of My Life I Went Often To A Wooded Hillside Where May Apples Grew By The Hundreds, And I Thought The Sourness Of Their Fruit Had A Symbolism For Me. Instead, I Was To Find Both Love And Happiness Soon Thereafter. So To Me [the May Apple] Is The Mandrake, The Love Symbol, Of The Old Dealers In Plant Restoratives.

There Are Some Things, But Not Too Many, Toward Which The Countryman Knows He Must Be Properly Respectful If He Would Avoid Pain, Sickness And Injury. Nature Is Neither Punitive Nor Solicitous, But She Has Thorns And Fangs As Wells As Bowers And Grassy Banks.