Hal Borland Quotes

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

A snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.

If you ever wondered why fishing is probably the most popular sport in this country, watch that boy beside on the water and you will learn. If you are really perceptive you will. For he already knows that fishing is only one part fish.

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.

All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all the tomorrows are ours to shape.

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren't written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.

The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.

Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.

The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.

To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.

Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

When we talk of flood control, we usually think of dams and deeper river channels, to impound the waters or hurry their run-off. Yet neither is the ultimate solution, simply because floods are caused by the flow of water downhill. If the hills are wooded, that flow is checked. If there is a swamp at the foot of the hills, the swamp sponges up most of the excess water, restores some of it to the underground water supply and feeds the remainder slowly into the streams. Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.

A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food - in sum, a plant. The green substance of this earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood.

Time after time ... today's crisis shrinks to next week's footnote to a newly headline disaster.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

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?

March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.

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!

All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

Catch a vista of maples in that long light and you see Autumn glowing through the leaves.... The promise of gold and crimson is there among the branches, though as yet it is achieved on only a stray branch, an impatient limb or an occasional small tree which has not yet learned to time its changes.

Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.

There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.

For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.

Man is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this world.

There is a leisure about walking, no matter what pace you set, that lets down the tension.

Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.

Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.

Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.

He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.

There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.