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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Thoughts From My Journal – Misinterpreted
Last night I sat watching the moon, barely gibbous at its zenith directly above, with a halo holding on about 15 degrees radius. Also the stars with Orion not far west of the moon. Wispy cloudy. I love desert nights and can sit for hours keeping an eye out on the sky. Also on the horizon and things that stand between. Not far in front of me stood a forty-foot saguaro with three arms visible in silhouette. I think of these cacti as the sequoia of the desert. Both stand out among their brethren as the biggest and most estimable and both often meet their ends from wind-throw, too vertically ambitious perhaps for their roots to sustain. Saguaro...
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