john muir
I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the person known as Mr. John Muir.
Here is a person who is one of my idols. He is accredited as being the father of the conservation movement and as being responsible for the birth of the National Park system in our country which preserves huge tracts of wilderness.
This guy was intense. Almost not even human. He was so into the outdoors he would walk around in the mountains for days with little more than a loaf of bread, some tea, and his journal. He would walk out into the middle of storms and just hang out, enjoying the power of it all.
i have never heard anyone write the way he does. He has no doubt inspired masses of individuals to wonder at the beauty of Nature through the writings he left behind.
Who was this guy?
I have spent time with many naturalists throughout the country over the years. And I have been inspired by many of them in powerful ways. But to be perfectly honest, a good number of them exhibit massive displays of ego. This can be very confusing. It also produces suffering.
i recently revisited John Muir’s “My First Summer in the Sierra”, an account of his time spent in Yosemite working as a sheep herder. Reading it i was literally blown away. The way he glorifies Nature completely lays to waste any kind of ego energy in me or any of these other outdoor people i interact with. here’s an excerpt:
“From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drift enchanted……..In the midst of such beauty, pierced with it’s rays, one’s body is all one tingling palate. Who wouldn’t be a mountaineer! Up here all the world’s prizes seem nothing.”
Hahahaha! What a crazy man. Some kind of alien for sure.
i’d like to see a John Muir Day as a national holiday in which everyone takes off work to go to the mountains or a local wilderness area to explore.
the Man
