Outdoors, In God

I'm pretty sure I was 18 when I first read Walden and entered into my most fervent "outdoorsy" phase...so I was both chuckling and deeply touched when I read this during my morning meditation:

Only the person who contemplates the beauty of nature in God and is accustomed to regard it as his voice, his sphere, the mirror of his countenance, can, even in his mature years, experience nature as naïvely and ecstatically as in his eighteenth year, without a drop of melancholy.

--Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar

I think I hear the woods calling...