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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Sierra Nevada Water & Trees – Part 2
Another time, another foray along the Merced River toward Vernal and Nevada Falls. Water soothes. As I walked, the sun rose over the Valley rim just southeast of Half Dome. Tall trees stood above the rim, backlit. The one directly between my line of sight and the sun became solid, gleaming white, those just to its sides had branches aglow, and the next ones out had whitened needles. Large birds, probably ravens, flying into or past the trees were unknowingly whitewashed as well. While the physics of this are straightforward that doesn’t detract at all from the magical feel of it. How variously we can experience common things just by a shift...
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