My First Summer in the Sierra: The Journal of a Soul on Fire

by John Muir

We are now in the mountains and they are in us … making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun, – a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is. In this newness of life we seem to have been so always.

Again and again, the outer moves inwards, and the inner outwards, until such distinctions of perimeter almost cease to make sense.

He even writes lovingly of bluebottles – who ‘make all flesh fly’ – for their part in nature’s thriftily recyclical economy.

He asked not what wild places can do for us, but what they can do to us.

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

Along the river, over the hills, in the ground, in the sky, spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm, new life, new beauty, unfolding, unrolling in glorious exuberant extravagance, – new birds in their nests, new winged creatures in the air, and new leaves, new flowers, spreading, shining, rejoicing everywhere.

How gently the winds blow! Scarce can these tranquil air currents be called winds. They seem the very breath of Nature, whispering peace to every living thing.

Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

for few of us know as yet that scales may cover fellow creatures as gentle and lovable as feathers, or hair, or cloth.

Then to think of the infinite numbers of smaller fellow mortals, invisibly small, compared with which the smallest ants are as mastodons.

everything glowing with Heaven’s unquenchable enthusiasm.

one feels inclined to shout lustily on rising in the morning like a crowing cock.

dew manna coming down from the starry sky like swarms of smaller stars. How wondrous fine are the particles in showers of dew, thousands required for a single drop, growing in the dark as silently as the grass!

Yonder stands the South Dome, its crown high above our camp, though its base is four thousand feet below us; a most noble rock, it seems full of thought, clothed with living light, no sense of dead stone about it, all spiritualised, neither heavy looking nor light, steadfast in serene strength like a god.

the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue;

‘More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ‘As the sun, ere he has risen, sometimes paints his image in the firmament, e’en so the shadows of events precede the events, and in today already walks tomorrow.’

Wherever we go in the mountains, or indeed in any of God’s wild fields, we find more than we seek.

It seems strange that visitors to Yosemite should be so little influenced by its novel grandeur, as if their eyes were bandaged and their ears stopped.

sun, moon, stars, auroras. Creation just beginning, the morning stars ‘still singing together and all the sons of God shouting for joy.’

Yet it seems sad to feel such desperate repulsion from one’s fellow beings, however degraded.

mingled with these storm tones were those of the waterfalls on the north side of the canyon, now sounding distinctly, now smothered by the heavier cataracts of air, making a glorious psalm of savage wildness.

How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.

Every day opens and closes like a flower, noiseless, effortless.

In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.