John Muir (April 21, 1838 - December 24, 1914) also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks" During his childhood Muir's father made him read the Bible every day. Muir eventually memorized three-quarters of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament.
John of the Mountains was transformed by his experiences with nature and wildness and his vocabulary reflected that. He used synonyms like Light, Beauty and Love for God that contemporized language and made words vibrate with sensation.
It has been written that he has taken biblical language and inverted it to proclaim the passion of attachment, not to a supernatural world but to a natural one. To visit the mountains and sequoia forests was to engage in religious worship of utter seriousness and dedication.
"Do behold the King in his glory, King Sequoia. Behold! Behold! Seems all I can say. Some time ago I left all for Sequoia: have been and am at his feet fasting and praying for Light, for is he the greatest light in the woods; in the world."
Muir saw nature as a great teacher,
"revealing the mind of God," and this belief became the central theme of his later journeys and the "subtext" of his nature writing Muir used words like "glory" and "glorious" to suggest that light was taking on a religious dimension. Biblical writings often indicate a divine presence with light, as in the
burning bush or
pillar of fire, and described as
"the glory of God."
Muir wrote
"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."
"No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water,
or gardening - still all is Beauty."
"God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild."
"So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees...."
All of these snippets of quotes from Muir are profound but the intense sensation of feeling, vibrating with the universe, and flowing with the wind is expressed so gracefully in these nature prayers.
"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 away from you like the leaves of autumn."
"The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love."
-John Muir
When Muir proselytizes about nature he converts the civilized heathens to wildness. This particular quote makes me weep:
"The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right."
"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed -- chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. ... It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods -- trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries ... God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools --"
This quote is from a conversation Muir had while sauntering with a friend in the forest:
"People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word 'saunter?' It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, 'A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."
"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
No one says it better than Muir.
A contemporary of Muir was
Hudson Stuck. (November 11, 1863 - October 10, 1920) a British native who became an Episcopal priest, social reformer, and mountain climber. He was the first person to climb Mt. Denali and 100 years ago he protested when Mt. Denali, which means Great One was named Mt. McKinley. Stuck was a social reformer, he founded a night school for millworkers, a home for indigent women, and St. Matthew's Children's Home. In 1903 he gained passage in Texas of the first state law against child labor He regularly preached and wrote against lynching.
Stuck's goal was to teach
"that there is one God whose name is Love." Stuck did not want to strip away the particularities of tribal ways of life. In The Alaskan Missions of the Episcopal Church, he wrote that he was horrified at
"the havoc wrought by white men."
Once again we hear a vocabulary change of God to Love. The wildness experienced in Nature has a significant impact on these two prophets as they strive to understand Creation. It is clear as light that God is a sensation, an experience that evokes astonishment, marvel and wonderment. It is a Miracle!
