My 14 year old Girl Scouts are bridging from being Cadettes to being Senior Girl Scouts.  They prepare their ceremony, so it’s called a Scouts’ Own.   In gathering resources for them, I pulled a lot of books I thought they could get sage quotes and poems from.  Of course, they weren’t interested in even looking at my stuff.  Some are going to the internet, and some are writing poems of their own.  More power to ‘em!

But I started looking through the books and thinking about how they’ve grown, and how, in some ways, none of us will ever grow up.  One of my favorite books is What Camping Can Teach Us, Life’s Lessons Learned from the Great Outdoors.   It’s all quotes from other people, and I’ve included some of them in the entries I made just before this reflection.  I wish I could replicate the pictures too, because they’re so precious, but here are the words.  Enjoy!

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.  What you’ll discover will be wonderful.  What you’ll discover will be yourself.”

Alan Alda

“We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.”

Rutherford Birchard Hayes, What Camping Can Teach Us 

“There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it.”

Chinese Proverb

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

Franz Kafka

“Everyone must believe in something…

…I believe I’ll go canoeing.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.  Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” Jane Howard, What Camping Can Teach Us

“If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.” Doug Larson, What Camping Can Teach Us

Anyone who thinks they’re too small to effect change has never been in a tent with a mosquito!