The wisdom of 'Nature Near Home'

 Here is John Burroughs, the naturalist, in his essay “Nature Near Home”:

After long experience I am convinced that the best place to study nature is at one’s door ...

At home one should see and hear with more fondness and sympathy. Nature should touch him a little more closely there than anywhere else. He is better attuned to it than to strange scenes. The birds about his own door are his birds, the flowers in his own field and wood are his, the rainbow springs its magic arch across his valley, even the ever lasting stars to which one lifts his eye, night after night, and year after year, from his own doorstep, have something private and personal about them.

I think everyone who loves nature eventually comes to that same thought.

Burroughs suggested taking the same walk every day. I agree. I never get tired of Zarzamora Creek.

In his essay, Burroughs talks about how you come to know a place. If you walk the same country each day, you notice changes. Most of the year, the changes are subtle.

Right now, in spring, with so many different species of plants in bloom, the changes are explosive. It’s a good time to get out of the house, just to see what’s there.

• Source: “Nature Near Home” was originally published in Field and Study in 1919. It was reprinted in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau; New York: The Library of America, 2008.