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 – The Cactus Wren
One of my favorite sounds is the call of the cactus wren; no sound is more distinctive of the desert, at least as far as my ear is concerned. I’ve been so fond of it and them for so long that Lynn found a woodcarver to sculpt one for me: life-sized, painted exactly right, and looking ready to call. Yesterday as I walked, I heard it and saw the bird atop a high saguaro (someday someone will tell me how they do that, considering the spiny surface). The ravens are louder but since they’re everywhere distinctive of nowhere, which does not prevent my admiring them. The phainopepla I saw and heard just before the wren has a sweet but subtle call...
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