A Literary Prescription for

Awe in Nature

For the wonder that puts you gently back in your place — small, and part of something vast.

There is a particular feeling that comes from standing under a huge sky, or in an old wood, or at the edge of the sea: a sense of your own smallness that is somehow a relief rather than a diminishment. Researchers now have a name for it, and evidence that it quiets the anxious, self-centred churn of the mind and widens us out towards something larger. But you don’t need the science; you’ve felt it. These books and poems are for chasing that feeling and letting it do its slow, restorative work — the way awe shrinks your worries to their proper size and reminds you that you belong to a world far older and stranger and more beautiful than the one inside your head.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Three of these are the great works of nature writing — books that teach you to look until the ordinary turns extraordinary — and three are novels steeped in the living world, for readers who feel the natural world in their bones.

The Living Mountain

Nan Shepherd · 1977

A slim, luminous masterpiece, written in the 1940s but unpublished for decades. Shepherd walked the Cairngorms not to conquer them but to know them, and her prose is a lesson in a rarer kind of attention — patient, sensuous, humble. It quietly rewires how you look at a mountain, a stream, your own two feet on the ground. Among the most beautiful nature books ever written.

The Peregrine

J.A. Baker · 1967

One man’s obsessive, ecstatic account of a winter spent following peregrine falcons across the Essex flatlands. Baker’s prose is so intense it becomes almost hallucinatory — he seems to dissolve into the birds he watches. A strange, ferocious, transcendent book about giving yourself wholly over to the wild. Nothing else reads quite like it.

My First Summer in the Sierra

John Muir · 1911

Muir’s ecstatic journals of a season herding sheep in the High Sierra, drunk on light and granite and pine. He is the great poet of American wilderness, and here you feel the exact moment a person falls permanently, joyfully in love with the wild. Pure, contagious awe on every page.

Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver · 2000

Three interlocking stories unfold across one teeming Appalachian summer, alive with coyotes, moths, chestnut trees and human longing. Kingsolver writes the natural world as a full character — interconnected, indifferent, gorgeous — and reminds you, warmly, that you are part of the web, not above it. A sensuous, generous novel to fall right into.

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 2004

An old Iowa pastor writes a long letter to his young son, and it becomes a hymn to the wonder of ordinary existence — sunlight on water, the miracle of another face. Quiet, radiant and grateful, it is a novel about learning to see the world as astonishing before you have to leave it. Deeply consoling.

The Signature of All Things

Elizabeth Gilbert · 2013

The sweeping life of Alma Whittaker, a nineteenth-century botanist who gives herself utterly to the study of mosses and the deep mysteries of the living world. It’s a novel about wonder as a vocation — the joy and consolation of paying close, lifelong attention to nature. Rich, intelligent and quietly thrilling.

Poems about awe and nature

For when prose is not enough

Three short poems, each read in a moment — a bird against a huge sky, a marsh at the tide’s full, and the wordless pull of the turning year.

“To a Waterfowl”

William Cullen Bryant, 1818

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

Bryant watches a single bird cross an enormous evening sky and feels, in its certainty, something vast and benevolent at work. Awe often arrives like this — not as an answer, but as the sudden, steadying sense that you are held within something far larger than yourself.

Get this quote as a print →

“The Marshes of Glynn”

Sidney Lanier, 1878

How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night.

Lanier stands at the edge of the Georgia marshes as the tide comes to its full, and the whole scene tips over into something like worship. This is the sublime in its purest form: the moment a landscape becomes so still and so vast that it simply stops you, and you forget, for a breath, to be afraid of anything.

Get this quote as a print →

“A Vagabond Song”

Bliss Carman, 1896

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood —
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

Carman catches the wordless pull the turning year exerts on us — the way a change in the light or the leaves stirs something old and animal and glad. Awe isn’t only for mountains. Sometimes it’s just autumn, doing to your blood what it has always done.

Get this quote as a print →

Quotes & Prose

Quotes about awe and nature to keep

A few lines short enough to hold onto, from people who found in the natural world something that put them gently back in their place.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Henry David Thoreau

Get this quote as a print →

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.

Aldo Leopold

Get this quote as a print →

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God.

Anne Frank

Get this quote as a print →

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

Get this quote as a print →

Awe is not reserved for mountaintops. It is available most evenings, if you step outside and look up before the light goes.

Georgia Clare

Get this quote as a print →

From Georgia

Pause here, if you need to

A short practice for stepping outside and letting the world put you back in your place, whenever you need somewhere gentler to land.

Connected to the Divine: A 432Hz Meditation

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A 432Hz meditation to help you feel held by something larger than yourself, and quietly connected to all of it.

Listen Now For Free

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice — gently softening how you meet stress, anxiety and overwhelm, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

Explore the Toolkit →

Questions people ask

Reading for Awe in Nature

Where should I start?

Begin with Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, a slim, perfect book that teaches you how to look. Or, for pure contagious joy, John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. And if a whole book is too much today, the poems below take only a minute.

Is there really any point to seeking out awe?

There is, and it’s not just poetic. Awe has been shown to quiet the anxious, self-focused churn of the mind, to soften us towards others, and to leave us feeling both smaller and steadier. But you needn’t take the research’s word for it — a walk under a big sky usually makes the case on its own.

Which quotes about nature are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” (Henry David Thoreau) and “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” (John Muir). You’ll find more in the quotes section above.

I live in a city. Is this page still for me?

Absolutely. Awe doesn’t require wilderness — a park, a street tree, a patch of sky between buildings, the moon over the rooftops will all do it, if you look properly. These books and poems are really about learning to notice, and the natural world is closer than it seems, even in the middle of a city.

Awe in Nature

Prescribed reading

For when prose is not enough

Quotes about awe and nature to keep

Pause here, if you need to

Reading for Awe in Nature

Where should I start?

Is there really any point to seeking out awe?

Which quotes about nature are worth keeping?

I live in a city. Is this page still for me?

More prescriptions await.