I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

Burroughs frames nature not as scenery but as a restorative power that rebalances the self. “Soothed and healed” suggests emotional and even bodily repair, while “have my senses put in order” implies that modern life can disorder perception—making us anxious, dulled, or overstimulated. Going to nature becomes a kind of recalibration: attention is returned to proportion, rhythm, and direct experience. The line also reflects Burroughs’s characteristic naturalist ethos, in which careful observation of the outdoors is both a moral and psychological practice, restoring clarity and steadiness by reconnecting the mind to the nonhuman world.