Ooops I just remembered I have already asked this very same question in another thread, have I not? Sorry about that, my mind is muddled.

But once I´ve started I can´t help myself.

Here you go, another instance of exultation through the contemplation of nature. It´s an excerpt from The Razor´s Edge by Somerset Maugham (a book I highly recommend BTW, it´s been an eye-opener for me, a story about hippism before its time... and beautiful rendition of a man´s quest for spiritual awareness).

From "The Razor’s Edge"
W. Somerset Maugham

"When I’d been at the Ashrama just two years I went up to my forest retreat for a reason that’ll make you smile. I wanted to spend my birthday there. I got there the day before. Next morning I awoke before dawn and I thought I’d go and see the sunrise from the place I’ve just told you about. I knew the way blindfolded. I sat down under a tree and waited. It was night still, but the stars were pale in the sky, and day was at hand. I had a strange feeling of suspense. So gradually that I was hardly aware of it, light began to filter through the darkness, slowly, like a mysterious figure slinking between the trees. I felt my heart beating as though at the approach of danger. The sun rose."

Larry paused and a rueful smile played on his lips.

"I have no descriptive talent, I don’t know the words to paint a picture, I can’t tell you, so as to make you see it, how grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the day broke in its splendor. Those mountains with their deep jungle, the mist still entangled in the treetops, and the bottomless lake far below me. The sun caught the lake through a cleft in the heights and it shone like burnished steel. I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I’d never known such exaltation and such transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forego it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstasy of my bliss. When I came to myself I was exhausted and trembling. I fell asleep.

"It was high noon when I woke. I walked back to the bungalow, and I was so light at heart that it seemed to me that I hardly touched the ground. I made myself some food, gosh, I was hungry, and I lit my pipe."

Larry lit his pipe now.

"I dared not think that this was illumination, that I, Larry Darrell of Marvin, Illinois, had received when others striving for it for years, with austerity and mortification, still waited."

"What makes you think that it was anything more than a hypnotic condition induced by your state of mind combined with the solitude, the mystery of the dawn and the burnished steel of your lake?"

"Only my overwhelming sense of its reality. After all, it was an experience of the same order as mystics have had all over the world through the centuries. Brahmins in India, Sufis in Persia, Catholics in Spain, Protestants in New England; and so far as they’ve been able to describe what defies description they’ve described it in similar terms. It’s impossible to deny the fact of its occurrence; the only difficulty is to explain it. If I was for a moment one with the Absolute or if it was an inrush from the subconscious of an affinity with the universal spirit which is latent in all of us, I wouldn’t know."

In case you want to read the whole book:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/31592024/W-Somerset-Maugham-The-Razor-s-Edge

oh my word what a beautiful thread!

Thank you for the download of 'The Razors Edge', Dame Ragnelle, another on the list of must reads!

How wonderful you had this exultant experience! The gardens look magical. A refuelling for mind, body, heart and spirit!

Your beautiful place sounds very beautiful indeed White Fay, from my perspective, it exists inside you whatever you are doing or whoever you are with whether alone or not!
You know that idea of it doesn't matter where you travel, the most exquisite beauty is right here inside you...and indeed the whole world springs up through you!

I don't know quite how to say this here....lol...
Ok. For me since having a profound spiritual awakening experience (not instigated by external means or beliefs and I hasten to add spiritual is not religious) where my whole being could feel the energy of the environment the people the plants and animals around me, even the smallest blade of grass can fill me with ecstacy beyond containment! Imagine how it feels to be flooded with a large landscape of beauty! (even through photos !)And this is even whilst i am physically cut off from most of the natural world due to being ill, actually i rephrase, directly as a result of going inwards due to being very ill the awakening happened...when everything was stripped away, living in total darkness and isolation, and surrender came, suddenly a truer reality began to stream through me like liquid light especially through the heart, which is mainly where I 'feel' the energy of all things.

Lol, i'm guessing you use 'orgasm' in a metaphorical sense Dame, but I actually have what I have come to call heartgasms! where there is such an extreme rush of ecstatic energy through the heart (which then pours into everything else) the only experience you can liken it to is orgasm. And before you call the men in white coats i'm not alone in these kind of experiences,..it's part of a phenomenon called kundalini. Which is an energy we all have within..it goes crazy around nature. i just don't go on about them too much..understandably in a world which is focussed on the material. So you know, i learnt to keep quiet about it in most places. People can't help but judge or try to fit it i their world view, but i express it as it is.