An early sign of the gift, powerful and definitive, came when I reached the Sierra Nevada on my dissertation quest. Over the preceding days of driving a thousand plus miles, I had endured bouts of high anxiety. What on earth had I done by leaving a good job and taking off on a romantic journey that might only expose my incompetence as writer, Nature explorer, and scholar, and having no notion what I would do when (if) I successfully finished?
A Life Considered, page 65
photo by Pablo Fierro
National Indie Excellence Award Finalist 2020
We recognize awakening when we experience it, wonder at the moment’s appearance and passing, and appreciate its teaching.
Reverence for Existence, page 58
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.
~John Muir
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Winter – Big Bend National Park
Wintertime, and I have come to Big Bend National Park, but only for a few hours as I pass through. This is a place where, during the 1990s and 2000s, I spent considerable time, but in moving to California it was shouldered out by the Sierra and distance. I always liked camping in the Chisos Basin, an intrinsically pleasing place with ready access to many trails. My reaction to being there today, as I made short walks and found good places to sit and contemplate, was a little surprising but immensely gratifying (in spite of the crowd, a reminder of how Covid has affected travel habits). From the Basin I could see trailheads and imagine the...
It is the twenty-seventh of October now, and early in the morning. The moon is over the southwest mountains. It has definitely moved out of fullness, more noticeable than last night. I have never before asked when and where the moon changes phases. But now I know: always, everywhere, slowly.
Reverence for Existence, page 147
“Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally.”
But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.
~ John Muir