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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Post Fire Lava Beds National Monument
I have moved several hundred miles north of the lower Owens Valley where I was camped and am now at Lava Beds N. Monument. I was last here late last summer after the fire that burned 70% of the Monument; ironically, fires to the west brought so much smoke eastward that I was forced to leave earlier than I had wanted to; it was like being awash in fiery dominance. I’ve returned to see how things look nine months later. It’s virtually a cliché to speak of how landscapes regenerate after fires, how most ecosystems have always depended on and adapted to periodic fires, and so forth, which is true and has the added benefit of assuaging the pain...
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