John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire Quotes

“We are not here to exist; we are here to live, to face death and stare it down. We are here to trust in God and to embrace this world in all its quiet and violent beauty, to break down the walls of our own prejudices and believe in something greater than ourselves. We are here to paddle into our worst fears and come out the other side to discover glaciers, to meet them face-to-face, and to celebrate a sense of wonder and God's plan that we find only in Nature.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“The last frontier is not Alaska, outer space, the oceans, or the wonders of technology. It’s open-mindedness. Honor the land and its first nation peoples, and their ability to acquire wisdom, sustenance, and happiness from the wild plants and animals around them. Learn through story. Sleep on the ground. Listen. Travel by kayak and canoe.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

“Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“The more we are removed from nature, the more we are denied our birthright to play in forests, climb mountains, follow streams, and fall in love with meadows, to become creative, self-actualized, deeply intuitive.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

“For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“busy, as if hearing the command ‘Increase and multiply and replenish the earth.’” In so writing, Muir turned Genesis on its head, according to biographer Stephen Fox, “for in the Bible it ordered man to multiply and then ‘subdue’ the world to his own purposes, to establish ‘dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” In Muir’s version, all natural organisms were to reproduce for their own purposes, not to serve man alone. “In his pantheism,” Fox wrote, Muir “sensed a corresponding affinity with their [Tlingit] religious ideas. Freed of Christianity’s human conceits, they prayed to nature gods and allowed nonhuman creatures—like Stickeen—into their heaven.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America