"Live in each season as it passes; breath the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let these be your only diet-drink and botanical medicines...
Be blown on by all the winds. Open all of your pores and breath in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons...
Grow green with spring-yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each season's influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your especial use. The vials of summer never made a man sick, only those which he has stored in his cellar. Drink the wines not of your own but of natures bottling - not kept in a goat or pig skin, but in the skins of a myriad fair berries.
Let nature do your bottling, as also your pickling and preserving.
For all nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. With the least inclination to be well we should not be sick. Men have discovered, or think they have discovered the salutariness of a few wild things only, and not all of nature. Why nature is but another name for health."
-Henry David Thoreau
Replies