Nature

In itself the beauty of nature leads the soul away from sin and worldly attractions, and toward purity, peace, and God.

As we contemplate the beauty of nature, as we study its lessons in the cultivation of the soil, in the growth of the trees, in all the wonders of earth and sea and sky, there will come to us a new perception of truth. (COL 125.3)

If we can cultivate within us a beauty of soul corresponding to the beauty of nature around us, there will be a blending of the divine and human agencies. {FLB 274.6}

What an influence an outdoor life among the flowers and fruit-laden trees has upon those who are sick both in body and in mind! After they stay for a short time at a sanitarium situated in the midst of the beauties of nature, hope begins to take the place of despair. The heart is softened by the objects of beauty in nature that the great Master Artist has given to mankind as pictures in which are portrayed His goodness and love.... {MM 232.4}

In nature may always be found something to divert the attention of the sick from themselves and direct their thoughts to God. Surrounded by His wonderful works, their minds are uplifted from the things that are seen to the things that are unseen. The beauty of nature leads them to think of the heavenly home, where there will be nothing to mar the loveliness, nothing to taint or destroy, nothing to cause disease or death. {MH 265.3}

In training His disciples, Jesus chose to withdraw from the confusion of the city to the quiet of the fields and hills, as more in harmony with the lessons of self-abnegation He desired to teach them. And during His ministry He loved to gather the people about Him under the blue heavens, on some grassy hillside, or on the beach beside the lake. Here, surrounded by the works of His own creation, He could turn the thoughts of His hearers from the artificial to the natural. In the growth and development of nature were revealed the principles of His kingdom. As men should lift up their eyes to the hills of God, and behold the wonderful works of His hands, they could learn precious lessons of divine truth. Christ’s teaching would be repeated to them in the things of nature. So it is with all who go into the fields with Christ in their hearts. They will feel themselves surrounded with a holy influence. The things of nature take up the parables of our Lord, and repeat His counsels. By communion with God in nature, the mind is uplifted, and the heart finds rest. {DA 291.1}

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life. — Muir’s marginal note in volume I of Prose Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keep close to Nature’s heart... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean. — Muir quoted by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir (1915) chapter 7

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. — The Yosemite (1912), page 256.

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail. — Our National Parks , 1901, page 56.

Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 235.

No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening - still all is Beauty! — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 208.

In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 317.

We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all. — June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, in Badè’s Life and Letters of John Muir.

When one is alone at night in the depths of these woods, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. Every leaf seems to speak. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 295 (quoted in The Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale, p. 313.)

Fresh beauty opens one’s eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty. — The Mountains of California (1894) chapter 15.

Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue. — My First Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 231.

Man must be made conscious of his origin as a child of Nature. Brought into right relationship with the wilderness he would see that he was not a separate entity endowed with a divine right to subdue his fellow creatures and destroy the common heritage, but rather an integral part of a harmonious whole. He would see that his appropriation of earth’s resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty for all. — by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, describing Muir’s remedy for human misery in her book, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945) page 188.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. ... It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries ... God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that. — Our National Parks (1901) chapter 10.

Range of Light:

Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light. — The Yosemite (1912) chapter 1.

So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees.... — My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 4.

Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes - all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them. — The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, (1913), pages 186-187

Everything is flowing — going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks... While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood...in Nature’s warm heart. — My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 10.

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality. — My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 2.

By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life.... — “Mt. Shasta” in Picturesque California (1888-1890), chapter 10 (off-site link) page 148, and in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 3.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 438.

Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 320.

I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in “creation’s dawn.” The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day. — “Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon,” Overland Monthly, August, 1873; and John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 72.

There is a love of wild nature in everybody an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties. — From Muir’s journals - cited in Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale (1954); and A Passion for Nature by Donald Worster (2008) page 319.

How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make - leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone - we all dwell in a house of one room - the world with the firmament for its roof - and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 321.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter. — Letter to wife Louie, July 1888, Life and Letters of John Muir (1924), chapter 15.

It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far! — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 313.

If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit-wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go moping among the tombs, not around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature’s laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning. But my first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite’s falls. How grand to move about in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies, looking outward as from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining! — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), pages 43-44.

Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and law-givers are ever at their wits‘ end devising. The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add compulsory recreation? ... Our forefathers forged chains of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think of pure rest or of the healing power of Nature. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 234.

One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last. — My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 10.

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony. — Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, p.41-42

Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature. Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living.... How beautiful is all Death! — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), pg. 222.

The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang-“home-going.” So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit-waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own Heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast-all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share Heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. “Our lives are rounded with a sleep.” — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), p. 339-340.

The snow is melting into music. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 107.

How little note is taken of the deeds of Nature! What paper publishes her reports? .... Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines? Who reports and works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains? And what record is kept of Nature’s colors - - the clothes she wears - of her birds, her beasts - her live-stock? — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) p. 220.

If one pine were placed in a town square, what admiration it would excite! Yet who is conscious of the pine-tree multitudes in the free woods, though open to everybody? — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) p. 220.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. — Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1, page 1.

Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), p. 337.

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.“ — from ”Wild Wool“, from ”Overland Monthly“ (April 1875) reprinted in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 1.

Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.... This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation’s plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever. — from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) - Read longer excerpt.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever. —My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) chapter 2.

The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it. ... So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for. — “The National Parks and Forest Reservations” in a speech by John Muir (Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club Held November 23, 1895.) Published in Sierra Club Bulletin, (1896).

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. — from Our National Parks by John Muir (1901) last paragraph Chapter 3

All Nature’s wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring , thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature’s heart. — “Three adventures in the Yosemite” (off-site link tounz.org) in “The Century Magazine”, vol. LXXXIII, no. 5 (March, 1912) page 661 [also available on Google Books]; modified slightly in The Yosemite (1912) chapter 4.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938, republished 1979, page 439.

One touch of nature makes all the world kin. — The Cruise of the Corwin (1917) chapter 3 (Echoing William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.")

As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can. — Quoted from Muir Journals (undated fragment, c. 1871) by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945) page 144.

How many hearts with warm red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining! A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours. — Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1.

These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. — The Yosemite (1912) chapter 15.

How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun’s rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all round the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris — we hear them boom again, for we read past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarser senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 226.

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society. Nowhere will you find more company of a soothing peace-be-still kind. Your animal fellow beings, so seldom regarded in civilization, and every rock-brow and mountain, stream, and lake, and every plant soon come to be regarded as brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless winds. This one noble park is big enough and rich enough for a whole life of study and aesthetic enjoyment. It is good for everybody, no matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a mail of business habits like a tree with bark. None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 350.

Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 350-351.

Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone. — The Mountains of California (1894) chapter 10.

My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having made a bark shed to shelter me from the rain and partially dry my clothing, I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers. — Travels in Alaska (1915) chapter 2.

One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers‘ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 95.

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s workshops. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) pages 315-316.

There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better. — Letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, location and date indicated as “Squirrelville, Sequoia Co. Nut Time” (c. 1870) as quoted in The Life and Letters of John Muir (1924) chapter 8.

Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another — killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities. — from “Wild Wool”, from “Overland Monthly” (April 1875) reprinted in Steep Trails (1918) chapter 1.

Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God’s wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled, and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy-laden year ... give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. — Our National Parks (1901) Chapter 1.

Lie down among the pines for a while, then get to plain pure white love-work ... to help humanity and other mortals and the Lord. — Letter from John Muir to Mrs. J.D. (Katharine) Hooker, 19 September 1911, from Para, Brazil, as quoted in The Life and Letters of John Muir (1924) chapter 17, II and in John Muir’s Last Journey (2001) page 67.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish. — John Muir, — “The National Parks and Forest Reservations” in a speech by John Muir (Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club Held November 23, 1895.) Published in Sierra Club Bulletin, (1896), v. 1, no. 7, January 1896, pp 271-284, at 282-83.

All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God’s eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best. — John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938) page 299.

[On a Sierra Club Outing, author Albert Palmer tells of a conversation he had with John Muir on the trail. He asked Muir, “Someone told me you did not approve of the word ‘hike.’ Is that so?” His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied]:

“I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.” — John Muir, as quoted by Albert W. Palmer, The Mountain Trail and its Message (1911) pages 27-28 - excerpted in A Parable of Sauntering .

With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake, feeling yourself contained on one of Nature’s most sacred chambers, withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it yet everything about you is beating with warm, terrestrial human love, delightfully substantial and familiar. — John Muir, “ The Glacier Meadows” Scribner’s Monthly, February, 1879, from Nature Journal with John Muir edited by Bonnie Johanna Gisel (Poetic Matrix Press, 2006) and The Glacier Meadows, Chapter 7, of The Mountains of California (1894).

Going to the mountains is going home. — Our National Parks, (1901), chapter 1, page 1.

“Hiking - I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ”A la sainte terre,‘ ’To the Holy Land.‘ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ’hike‘ through them.“ ~ John Muir, quoted by Albert Palmer in A Parable of Sauntering

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

The winds will blow their own freshness into you

While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

When you try to select any one thing out, you find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.

“Wilderness is a necessity ... They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.”

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”

“How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof. In such places, standing alone on the mountaintop, it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make — leaves and moss like the marmots and the birds, or tents or piled stone — we all dwell in a house of one room — the world with the firmament for its roof — and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving track.”

“The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the moutnains — mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s work-shops.

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.

“In nature nothing exists alone.

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

“In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.

“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.

“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew i would never see it again?

“Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.”

“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

“The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”

10. “A world without open country would be universal jail.”

11. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

12. “There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details.”

18. “When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about.”

19. “I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.”

20. “High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.”

23. “There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.”

“An indoor life is the next best thing to a premature burial.”

In 1940 Helen Keller published “Let Us Have Faith” and a chapter titled “Faith Fears Not” contained the following passage. Boldface has been added to excerpts: 1

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

The secret to living longer is eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure. — Tibetan proverb

Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world’s beauty and abundance. — Wendell Berry

The snow upon the hillsides

makes them like great flour sacks

on which the birds and animals

have cross-stitched with their tracks.

—Thelma Ireland

“There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection.”

“Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America. Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness.

Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton. America developed its mettle at the muddy gaps of the Cumberlands, in the swift rapids of its rivers, on the limitless reaches of its western plains, in the silent vastness of primeval forests, and in the blizzard-ridden passes of the Rockies and Coast ranges.

If we lose wilderness, we lose forever the knowledge of what the world was and what it might, with understanding and loving husbandry, yet become. These are islands in time — with nothing to date them on the calendar of mankind. In these areas it is as though a person were looking backward into the ages and forward untold years. Here are bits of eternity, which have a preciousness beyond all accounting.“

“In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.”

“The earth laughs in flowers.”

“What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb into riotous gladness!”

Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace.

Terry Tempest Williams (1955 -) -https://sites.google.com/site/thoreauandwilderness/American-Nature-Writing/terry-tempest-williams

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein

In our literature and studies we idolize the young but they don’t know how to be young anymore. PCT hikers blast through. City kids survive on tech and distractions. Sense of wonder is almost gone.

“There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.” — Walt Streightiff

except you become as children

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” socrates

If you want to witness a natural display of a sense of wonder, just observe a child. A child’s whole world is viewed through the eyes of wonder and excitement. A child has no judgements of why things are so, but rather a child is in awe of life and views life through innocence, purity and curiosity.

You may have often heard the term “be childlike,” referring to our adult self to let go of the adult ego and be more open and curious. The truth is that we lose our sense of wonder as we become adults.

We want to know what will happen, how it will happen and when it will happen, as if this will give us a sense of control over our lives. We want certainty of how things will work out with our relationships, with our professions, with our finances and with life in general.

Our need to know the outcome has taken precedent in our lives so much so that we are missing the magic of life. We are not comfortable with surprises and things that happen that we don’t understand. We do not allow the magic of life to unfold. Children on the other hand understand the magic of life; they see and feel it everywhere. Their sense of wonder is an innate quality they are born with and navigate through their young life seeing the world with much amazement.

What happens as we enter adulthood? Where has this sense of wonder and openness to what life will bring gone? What happened to trusting life to show up as it is meant to? What’s this need to know rather than be open to what life is here to show us?

Just for one minute ask yourself what if you approached life with the question, “I wonder why this is happening to me?” rather than judging what is occurring or coming from a place of fear. 

In the natural world, God has placed in the hands of the children of men the key to unlock the treasure house of His word. The unseen is illustrated by the seen; divine wisdom, eternal truth, infinite grace, are understood by the things that God has made. Then let the children and youth become acquainted with nature and nature’s laws. Let the mind be developed to its utmost capacity and the physical powers trained for the practical duties of life. But teach them also that God has made this world fair because He delights in our happiness; and that a more beautiful home is preparing for us in that world where there will be no more sin. The word of God declares: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9. (CT 187)