A Minute Meditation

No. 224

I never saw a discontented tree.  They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

-- John Muir --
from  John Muir: In His own words

 
He may have a point here.  

A Minute Meditation

No. 227

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world--the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.  The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.  

-- John  Muir --
In His Own Words 

There's nothing I can add to this.   

A Minute Meditation

No. 225

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.  

-- John Muir --
In His Own Words 


This sounds strange today in a world of spaceships and trips to the moon and probes to many of the planets and moons in the Solar System.  Recently I read of a probe that has now gone beyond the boundary of the Solar System..  Perhaps he's talking about a different Universe?
 

John Muir: Destruction or Creation?

No. 66

How lavish is Nature, building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.   



181

.  .  . One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made.  That this is still the morning of creation.  That mountains, long conceived, are now being born, brought to light by the glaciers, channels traced for rivers, basins hollowed for lakes.  That moraine soil is being ground and outspread for coming plants .  .  . while the finest part of the grist, seen hastening far out to sea, is being stored away in the darkness, and builded, particle on particle, cementing, and crystallizing, to make the mountains and valleys and plains of other landscapes, which, like fluent pulsing water, rise and fall, and pass on through the ages in endless rhythm and beauty. 


All quotations are from John Muir: In His Own Words 


It certainly is a different way to view nature, especially when in a mountainous area.

Is there a difference between the acts of nature--earthquakes, landslides, storms, volcano eruptions, mountain building, etc.-- when what was there before is gone and replaced with something else on the one hand and taking down old buildings and fine old neighborhoods whose only sin is that they are old and replacing them with condos, apartment complexes, big box stores, and parking lots?

But, I guess I will be told that that is progress, and that one shouldn't stand in the way of progress,  should  one?

John Muir: life in the mountains

The following is an excerpt from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir.

79
"These beautiful days must enrich all my  life.  They do not exist as mere pictures--maps hung upon the walls of memory to  brighten at times when touched by association or will, only to sink again like a landscape in the dark;  but they saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always."

-- John Muir --
from John Muir: In His Own Words


It's the same when I listen to my favorite musical works, the ones that I don't just hear,  but I can feel in my bones

John Muir: immortality, sort of anyway

94

Bears are made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters.  A bear's days are warmed by the same sun, his dwellings are overdomed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and ebbs with heart-pulsings like ours, and was poured from the same First Fountain.  And whether he at last goes to our stingy heaven or no, he has terrestrial immortality.  His life not long, not short, knows no beginning, no ending.  To him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the accidents of time, and his years, markless and boundless, equal Eternity.

-- John Muir --
from John Muir: In His Own Words 


Many have said that only humans are "mortal" for we alone know we have a beginning and an end.  Others on this planet are unaware of this and, therefore, have a form of immortality.  While this idea is not unique to John Muir, I don't think I've ever heard anyone put it as clearly and concretely as this. 

A Minute Meditation

At one point in his stay in the Sierras, John Muir got a job on a sheep ranch.  This resulted in the following observation, which may or may not be profound.  And, even if it isn't profound, I had to stop and think about it.  And smile also.


73
"Aside from mere money profit one would rather herd wolves than sheep."

-- John Muir --
from  John Muir:  In His Own Words



A question, as I reviewed the above, suddenly popped up:  Which would be easier?

Herding wolves or herding cats? 

Or--more fun?


A chuckle this time.


Hmmmm, methinks the summer heat is getting to me.   

Jonh Muir: some thoughts on graveyards

9
You . . . are with Nature in the grand old forest graveyard, so beautiful that almost any sensible person would choose to dwell here with the dead rather than with the lazy, disorderly living.




10
Bonaventure is called a graveyard, a town of the dead, but the few graves are powerless in such a depth of life.  The rippling of the living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbable grandeur of the oaks, mark this place of graves as one of the Lord's most favored abodes of life and light.



11
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death.  Instead of the sympathy, the friendly union, of life and death so apparent in Nature, we are taught death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the archenemy of life.
                          


12
. . . How assiduously Nature seeks to remedy these labored art blunders.  She corrodes the iron and marble, and gradually levels the hill which is always heaped up, as if a sufficiently heavy quantity of clods could not be laid upon the dead.  Arching grasses come one by one; seeds come flying on downy wings, silent as fate, to give life's dearest beauty for the ashes of art; and strong evergreen arms laden with ferns and tillandsia drapery are spread over all--Life at work everywhere, obliterating all memory of the confusion of man.



All quotations come from  John Muir: His Own Words.  


His sentiments definitely would not be in tune with Halloween, would they?  But, of course, he's mainly speaking of daytime here.   I wonder if anyone else has expressed similar sentiments about graveyards. 

A Minute Meditation

No. 63

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe...

-- John Muir --
from John Muir: In His Own Words

There's an Eastern flavor to this comment, isn't there? 

A Minute Meditation

 It seems as though humans, world-wide, have always regarded mountains as special places.  So many cultures placed the residences of their gods and goddesses on mountain tops.  And, how many prophets, sages, and poets have retreated to the mountains, either for a short time or for a lifetime?

Here's a brief reaction to a day in the Sierras from a writer whom I have just belatedly discovered.  

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where.  Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars.  This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

-- John Muir --
from  My First Summer in the Sierra

I like that last line:  This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality. There is no past, no future, just the ever-present now, just being there.  

John Muir on the unseen

I just encountered this quotation this morning and thought that it somehow fits in with my previous post with the poem about the Unseeable Animal.  The following is from a journal entry by John Muir (author, naturalist, poet, hiker, and father of our national parks system, and if anyone can make the claim, he can)   He is also founder of the Sierra Club.

If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world,  and so in strict reality we should be,  just if all the world besides our senses were changed. 

--John Muir --
from John Muir: In His Own Words


That's an interesting comment, coming from over a century and a half ago.  Science since then has discovered that many animals detect visual, auditory, tactile, and chemical signals that we are insensitive to.  For example, some migratory birds may use the earth's magnetic field to guide them to their destinations.  Bats, dogs, cats, whales, and dolphins are sensitive to sounds we cannot hear. 

I wonder what the world would look like if we could experience those cues that are undetectable by us now.  Perhaps that "unseeable animal" is real.  While I don't consider myself to be a full-fledged romantic, for some reason, though, I prefer Wendell Berry's "unseeable animal."


The other work by John Muir that I'm reading is A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (Annotated).  This small book is based on his hike from Indianapolis, Indiana, beginning on September 1, 1867, just a few years after the end of the Civil War, to Savannah, Georgia, which he reached on  October 8, 1867.  I may post on this one in the future.