Topic: These blessed mountains...

[Jennifer-]

These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty,
no petty personal hope or experience has room to be . . . . the whole
body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire
or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all
one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure
glow not explainable. One's body then seems homogeneous
throughout, sound as a crystal.
-   John Muir

[Jennifer-]

There came to me a delicate, but at the same time a deep, strong and
sensuous enjoyment of the beautiful green earth, the beautiful sky and
sun; I felt them, they gave me inexpressible delight, as if they embraced
and poured out their love upon me.  It was I who loved them, for my heart
was broader than the earth; it is broader now than even then, more thirsty
and desirous. After the sensuous enjoyment always come the thought, the
desire: That I might be like this; that I might have the inner meaning of the
sun,  the light, the earth, the trees and grass, translated into some growth
of excellence in myself, both of the body and of mind; greater perfection
of physique, greater perfection of mind and soul; that I might be
higher in myself.
-   Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart

[Jennifer-]

Man becomes aware of the Sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself,
as something wholly different from the Profane ... In his encounters with
the Sacred, man experiences a reality that does not belong to our world
yet is encountered in and through objects or events
that are part of the world.
-   Mircea Eliade

 

[Jennifer-]

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving,
swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship.  But though
to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden
cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while
incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and
groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into
cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.
-   John Muir

 

[Jennifer-]

More quotes by 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.

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The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
- John of the Mountains (1938), page 313.

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Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
- Letter to wife Louie, July 1888, Life and Letters of John Muir 1924.

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Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?

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Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

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I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
- from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938, republished 1979, page 439.

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My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having made a bark shed to shelter me from the rain and partially dry my clothing, I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers.

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Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.

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 Lie down among the pines for a while then get to plain pure white love-work to help humanity and other mortals.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.
- John Muir, "The National Parks and Forest Reservations," Sierra Club Bulletin, v. 1, no. 7, January 1896, pp 271-284, at 282-83.

~*~