Its wonder,
majesty, and downright gob-smacking awe.
Nature
has the power to lift us out of ourselves, especially when we’re in the
wilderness.
It
renews, restores, and rehabilitates us when the pressure and drudgery of city
life become too much. If you have a place in nature where you go because you
feel alive there, then you’ll appreciate the following quotes. While these
writers were all speaking about Yosemite, and often in terms of spirituality,
feel free to translate the words to fit your own favorite place, whether it’s
at the ocean, in the desert, or out on the prairie.
*
"That
mute appeal (pointing to El Capitan) illustrates it, with more convincing
eloquence than can the most powerful arguments of surpliced priests." -- Lafayette Bunnell, 1851
"...as
the scene opened in full view before us, we were almost speechless with
wondering admiration at its wild and sublime grandeur.” --James Hutchings, 1855
A
"passage of scripture [is] written on every cliff." -- Thomas Starr King, Rev. 1860
"I
am sitting here in a little shanty made of sugar pine shingles this Sabbath
evening.” ‘Here I worship as never before.’
-- John Muir, 1868
"I
remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep
climbing.' Upon reaching the top Ryder [Snyder] gives out a 'beautiful broken
yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity' and then suddenly everything
was just like jazz." -- Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums
"The
experience from which these Yosemite poems come is the experience of
interacting with the Other — of constantly trying to be aware of the Universe
as all one body, of trying not to be separate from it but recognize every part
of it as part of yourself. There is nothing alien in it at all. Sometimes
interacting with the Other remains theoretical. Even then it is interesting.
Sometimes it is an experience. When it is, I can make a poem out of it. It
takes on the force of poetry." --
Gary Snyder, 1955
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