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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2022 The Northern Route – Norway
The trip from Oslo to Bergen was the first time ever that I’ve felt shuffled around in a prototypical “tour” group. Thirteen hours from point to point with five changes of transport (train to train to boat to bus and back to train)—a recipe for exhaustion and annoyance. Both of which it was but what saved it were the two hours on the fjord boat. I look at the route we took on the map and am surprised to see that it was a relatively short V-shaped course from Flam to Gudvangen, a mere arm of what’s known as the longest (a couple hundred km) and deepest (1,300 meters at one point) fjord in Norway, the Sognefjord. Seeing the complex of arms on...
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