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Dear (Please pardon cross postings…) Happy
Earth Day and John Muir's Birthday. -Rita. ----------------------------- As
long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret
the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint
myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the
world as I can. These
temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect
contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the
mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for
water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever
been consecrated by the heart of man. How
infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual
eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock
in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun's rays,
then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the
center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of
turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect
wings, enables us to hear, all around the world, the vibration of every needle,
the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like
particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris - we
hear them boom again, and we read the past sounds from present conditions.
Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a
synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more
likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination
makes us infinite. Government
protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the
mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public
parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth
infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns. Winds
are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to
read them; telling their wanderings ever by their accents alone. 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. One
day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how
willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals
are so sensitive as those of the human soul. The
mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile
soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and
deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain
dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's
workshops. There
is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold,
fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland
for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to
Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless
glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better. Plants,
animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one
another, and through
the midst of one another -- killing and being killed,
eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities. 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. 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."
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