Walking

"When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is good for man and for trees. A man`s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads ok muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves   above while another primitive forest rots bellow–such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey."

Henry David Thoreau In Walking, 1862