Words from John
Muir
(1838-1914)
for John
Muir's 163rd Birthday, April 21, 2001
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares drop off like autumn leaves. [Muir citation unknown]
Up and away
to Lake Tenaya,--another big day, enough
for a lifetime. The rocks, the air, everything speaking with
audible
voice or silent; joyful, wonderful, enchanting, banishing weariness and
sense
of time. No longing for anything now or hereafter as we go
home
into
the mountain's heart. The level sunbeams are touching the
fir-tops,
every leaf shining with dew.... Many mossy emerald bogs,
meadows,
and
gardens in rocky hollows to wade and saunter through--and what fine
plants
they give me, what joyful streams I have to cross,... and what a
wondrous
breadth of shining granite pavement to walk over for the first time
about
the shores of the lake! On I sauntered in freedom complete;
body
without
weight as far as I was aware; now wading through starry parnassia bogs,
now
through gardens shoulder deep in larkspur and lilies, grasses and
rushes,
shaking off showers of dew; crossing piles of crystalline moraine
boulders,
bright mirror pavements, and cool, cheery streams going to Yosemite;
crossing bryanthus carpets and the scoured pathways of avalanches, and
thickets of
snow-pressed ceanothus; then down a broad, majestic stairway into the
ice-sculptured
lake-basin. The snow on
the
high mountains is
melting fast,
and the streams are singing bank-full, swaying softly through the level
meadows
and bogs, quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting
in
deep pools, leaping, shouting in wild exulting energy over rough
boulder
dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms. No Sierra
landscape
that
I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in
manufactories
is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and full of
divine
lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to
everything
seems
marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems
reasonable
that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to
pick
out
anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand
invisible
cords that cannot be broken to everything in the universe. I
fancy
I can hear a heart beating in every crystal, in every grain of sand and
see
a wise plan in the making and shaping and placing of every one of
them.
All seems to be dancing in time to divine music...* and we
feel
like
stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow
mountaineers.
Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more
visible
the farther and higher we go; for mountains are fountains--beginning
places,
however related to sources beyond mortal ken.
*The
sentences in
bold italics are
from Muir's
Journal, July
27, 1869†. The remainder of
the passage is from Muir, My
First Summer in the Sierra, (Houghton Mifflin. Boston), pp.
209-212(1911). The following, more familiar passage replaced
the
bracketed material in My First Summer...:
"When we try to pick
out
anything by itself,
we
find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One
fancies a
heart
like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell,..."
† As quoted in Fox, S., John Muir and his Legacy: The American Conservation Movement. (Little, Brown. Boston, 1981) p. 291.