Welcome! I am a contemplative thinker and photographer from Colorado. In this blog, you'll discover photographs that I've taken on my hiking and backpacking trips, mostly in the American West. I've paired these with my favorite inspirational and philosophical quotes - literary passages that emphasize the innate spirituality of the natural world. I hope you enjoy them!

If you'd like to purchase photo-quote greeting cards, please go to www.NaturePhoto-QuoteCards.com .


In the Spirit of Wildness,

Stephen Hatch
Fort Collins, Colorado

P.S. There's a label index at the bottom of the blog.

Friday, January 6, 2012

It is not wise to belong to any religious party.


"I suppose it is not wise, not being natural, to belong to any religious party . . . Now if a person is wise, . . . he will say to himself, 'I am not a member of that or of any party.  I am God's child, . . . a fellow disciple with Christ' . . . A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a person from the vexation of thinking . . . The difficulty is that we do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all, and this accommodation is, I say, a loss of so much integrity and, of course, of so much power."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photo: Twin Sisters Peak with a solitary ponderosa pine lit up in the day's last light, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, December 2, 2011

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