a special retreat

----------------------- [excerpt from My Love Story, by Tina Turner -- published 2018] ------------ 

...I was happiest when I was outdoors.  Children adapt when life is hard.  They find something to help them get through it.  I was always out of the house, exploring, playing in the neighboring pastures, fields, and gardens, watching animals, looking at the sky.  

Home, especially when my mother was there, could be unpleasant.  After she left, it was just sad.  But nature was my special retreat, a world of love and harmony to me.  Even when I went there hurt and angry, it would transform me.  


"Where have you been all day?" I was asked when I came home, dreamy and disheveled.  Where had I been?  Nowhere in particular, just being outside made me feel good. -------------------- [end, excerpt]








     This passage form Tina Turner's second autobiography made me think of how the English poets wrote about nature...

-----------------------
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.




Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.


The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:


For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


~ Wordsworth

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