August 2nd
“I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Fourth of August

“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

6th of August
“Be water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth, and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world.”

Brenda Peterson (1950-), author {from Appalachian Treks}

• The Eighth Day of the Eighth Month
  The Journey’s End by Wendell Berry

   

  “Where I am going I have never been before. And since I have no destination that I know, where I am going is always where I am. when I come to good resting places, I rest. I rest whether I am tired or not because the places are good. Each one is an arrival. I am where I have been going.”

• August Ninth
  Writing From the Center, by Scott Russell Sanders:

   

  “What we need, all of us who go on two legs, is to reimagine our place in creation. We need to enlarge our conscience so as to bear, moment by moment, a regard for the integrity and bounty of the earth. There can be no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives. We must find the desire, the courage, the vision to live sanely, to live considerately, and we can only do that together, calling out and listening, listening and calling out.”

• August, the 10th
  “The first step toward valuing and trusting food is probably eating food that has some integrity. People who hold their traditions of food preparation and presentation in high regard don’t tend to bargain-shop for cheap calories.”
  Camille Kingsolver from the website for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
• August 11
  From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place by Deborah Tall

   

  “Maybe we need different places for different phases of our lives. Maybe cherished places remain alive inside us even if we have to move on–our attachment to the earth not thinned, but widened. Still, I worry over the pile of fragments in my past, the running of one place into another. Wherever I am is cluttered with the memory of dozens of other landscapes.”

  found on Lifescapes

• The Twelfth Day of August
  “What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within us out into the world, miracles happen.” — Henry David Thoreau
• August 13th
  “Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.” — Kahlil Gibran
• August Fourteenth
  Why Write About Nature? by Susan Hanson

   

  “How can I understand that what is absent is not gone, that what has ended is not finished, that what is taken is returned as more than memory?”

• 15th of August
  “He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.”
  – M.C. Escher,
  found at Dark Chocolate, Red Wine
• Twice Eight, of the Eighth Month
  “A plan really is useful for signifying to yourself and other people that you like living, that you’re looking forward to living some more, that you have a certain appetite to continue the enterprise. But one’s real duty to the future is to do as you should do now. Make the best choices, do the best work, fulfill your obligations in the best way you can, and work on a scale that’s appropriately small. Make plans that are appropriately small. If you do those things, then the future will take care of itself. But if you don’t do those things, then you build up a debt against the future, which is what we’re doing now.”
  Wendell Berry, from Field Observations
• August XVIII
  “There is another way to live and think: it’s called agrarianism. It is not so much a philosophy as a practice, an attitude, a loyalty and a passion—all based in close connection with the land. It results in a sound local economy in which producers and consumers are neighbors and in which nature herself becomes the standard for work and production.”
  Wendell Berry, from The Food Project
• August 19th
  The wine of life is oozing drop by drop,
  “The leaves of life are falling one by one.”
  – Omar Khayyam
• Day Twenty…August
  Lifescapes: November 2006
  “You write a book and it’s like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don’t know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.”
  – Isabelle Allende
• Twenty First day. Eighth Month
  “The freedom to do something you’re not good at–just for the joy of it–has got to be one of the greatest gifts we can ever give ourselves.”
  – Patry Francis, from Simply Wait
• Aug 22nd
  “As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.”
  — Henry David Thoreau
• 23, August
  “Think sideways!”
  — Edward De Bono
• August, Thrice Eight
  “There may be more to learn from climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.”
  — Richard Nelson
• August Twenty-Fifth
  Benedicto:

   

  May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome,
  dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
  May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
  May your rivers flow without end,
  meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
  past temples and castles and poets’ towers
  into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
  through miasmal and mysterious swamps
  and down into a desert of red rock,
  blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone,
  and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
  where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
  where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
  where storms come and go
  as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
  where something strange and more beautiful
  and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams
  waits for you —
  beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

  — Edward Abbey, quoted at Beyond the Fields We Know

• 26, August
  “Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.”
  — Margaret Lee Runbeck
• Aug. Twenty and Seven
  “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”
  — Naguib Mahfouz
• 28th of August
  “When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.”
  — Sydney Smith
• August 209th
  “I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
  — Henry David Thoreau
• 30th Day of August
  “A lot of times if you take your glasses off the problem goes away”
  Felder Rushing, The Gestalt Gardener