“Wilderness is not a luxury, but a necessity of the human spirit”
-Edward Abbey
“Thousands of tired nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is gong home, that wilderness is a necessity”
“How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains.”
-John Muir
Our new year is a gift of 365 mornings resplendent in fresh beginnings and the possibility for sweet reflective endings. Here’s to giving each one of these days as glorious a greeting as the sun gives the mountains, with abundant gratitude from sunrise to sunset.
Happiest of New Years!! May it be brimming with Radiant Health, Adventure, Love, Learning, Deepening, Blessings, Unexpected Gifts and a Peaceful Heart, infused with nature, animals, family and friends!!
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
-Marcus Aurelius
“I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality.
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child– our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
“When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, …and the doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?” – Seneca
“Going to the woods is going home.”
-John Muir
“My roots are in the depths of the woods.” – Galle
To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.” – Mikhail Gorbachev
Ah Mountains! Providing peace, sustenance, beauty and strength.
They bring a felt sense for me that is very powerful and deeply comforting. I am embraced and absorbed by them. Completely.
The mountains truly and always are a balm for the soul and provide a cleansing for the spirit. I do so love living amongst these sentinels of abiding serenity and power.
“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”
-John Muir
“Keep close to Nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
-John Muir
“The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.”
-Thomas Wolfe
“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”
-Philip Connors
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
-John Muir
“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
-Robert Macfarlane
“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”
-Anatoli Boukreev
“Emerald slopes became so tall they touched the clouds, and showers painted diamond waterfalls that sluiced down cliff sides.”
-Victoria Kahler
“The mountain has left me feeling renewed, more content and positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again. For this time at least, I’ve let myself be rooted in the unshakable sanity of the senses, spared my mind the burden of too much thinking, turned myself outward to experience the world and inward to savor the pleasures it has given me.”
“Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God’s wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go uncounted.
If you are business-tangled, and so burdened with duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, then go to the Flathead Reserve; for it easily and quickly reached by the Great Northern Railroad. Get off the track at Belton Station, and in a few minutes you will find yourself in the midst of what you are sure to say is the best care-killing scenery on the continent – beautiful lakes derived straight from glaciers, lofty mountains steeped in lovely nemophila-blue skies and clad with forests and glaciers, mossy ferny waterfalls in their hollows, nameless and numberless, and meadowy gardens abounding in the best of everything …. ” John Muir
Glacier National Park – just a few photos of the wonders there…
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The forest is a sanctuary, a temple of contemplation, connection and peace. Serenity surrounds with a warm cohesiveness – an encasing womb. Comfort, meditation, life expressing itself, all waiting for our immersion. Honest and raw. Inviting and absorbing. A sweet embrace.
When you can, get into the forest again!
“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool unlying life will rush in.”
D.H. Lawrence
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
-John Muir
“We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
“A forest bird never wants a cage.”
-Henrik Ibsen
“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.”
-John Muir, The Mountains of California
The tree pictured below is traveling the same Milky Way as the rest of us, and as Carl Sagan says, “down deep, at the molecular heart of life” shares essentially the same components that make up we humans. I would love to feel the energy of this tree!
It is 3,200 years old and so massive it was impossible to get the whole tree into one photograph. This majestic giant sequoia is called The President and is located in California’s Sierra Nevada. It is 247 feet tall, 27 feet in diameter, and the article I read said it holds some 2 billion needles – the most of any tree on our planet. The tree is still growing, adding one cubic meter of wood per year!
This photo was quite an endeavor and labor of love requiring a pulley system with levers for climbers and requiring 32 days and 126 separate photos that are pieced together. (the little tiny red dot at the bottom of the picture is a person!)
The morning stars were resplendent as this new day unfolded.
Remembering that we all live in creation’s dawn is rejuvenating, exhilarating and liberating! We can always start anew bringing our best and most creative selves to this newest dawn.
“…I also live in ‘creation’s dawn.’
The morning stars still sing together,
and the world,
not
yet half made,
becomes more
beautiful every day.”
-John Muir
“Morning has broken like the first morning, blackbird has spoken like the first bird. Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning!”
–Morning Has Broken (Song Lyrics, Cat Stevens)
“Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again and fasten themselves to the high branches—and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it the thorn that is heavier than lead—if it’s all you can do to keep on trudging—there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what is wanted—each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning, whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.”
Nature’s peace and the knowing that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter, brings solace and serenity in all ways,
always…
“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 own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
-John Muir
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool unlying life will rush in.”
happens to us in the forest.”
and the world,
as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
