Daniel Capper - Learning Love from a Tiger: Religious Experiences with Nature

The snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada shimmered in the California sunrise as John Muir arose from his wilderness bed of oak leaves. Because he was helping to drive a flock of more than two thousand sheep up Yosemite Creek Valley to their summer highland pastures, Muir usually slept under the stars, or sky lilies, as he affectionately called them. After finishing a simple breakfast of tea, sugar, and bread, he quickly packed up his few possessions and was ready for a long day of climbing. The sheep moved at only one mile per hour, leaving Muir with plenty of time to investigate, sketch, and collect from the multitude of plants, animals, and geologic formations within his pristine mountain habitat. Unshackled from the urban-human social realities that he found so alienating, and freely communing with his forest environment, for the first time in his forty-one years the nature-loving Muir felt truly himself.

Born in Scotland on April 21, 1838, Muir immigrated with his family to Wisconsin when he was eleven. Eastern settlers had only recently come to Wisconsin, and Muir as a boy adored the wilderness setting into which he had been thrust. He went on to study botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin, but the upheavals caused by the Civil War led to his becoming a successful machinist and inventor. Then an industrial accident left him temporarily blind. At that time he feared above all not being able to see a flower again, and his desire to become a nature explorer like his hero, Alexander von Humboldt, burned hotter than ever. Thus, after he recovered his eyesight, he surprised even himself by quitting his job and enacting a plan to undertake a thousand-mile botanical saunter through the wilds stretching from Louisville, Kentucky, to Florida.

What Muir called his floral pilgrimage began on September 1, 1867, and he purposefully traveled by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way that he could manage. Over the next few weeks he would enter the first real mountains that he had ever seen; visit Savannah, Georgia, to resupply; and contract malaria in northern Florida. From Florida in January 1868 he sojourned to Cuba to find a ship to take him to South America in order to explore Amazonian foliage. But finding no transport to South America available, instead he traveled to San Francisco in March 1868 in order to explore the natural world at Yosemite, which had also been calling him.

Muir was no ordinary lover of nature (by which, of course, I mean nonhuman nature). In addition to the scientific side of his personality, he was a nature mystic who experienced the natural world as God in the flesh. He approached nature first and foremost spiritually, with the impassioned intellectual aspect of the experience coming along with the spiritual. For him, encountering nature meant directly embracing the sacred, or the awesome, fascinating, and numinous supernatural reality that the theologian Rudolf Otto described. Throughout his life Muir ecstatically bathed in holiness through his profound, unbounded immersion in the natural world. As he wrote in his journal, I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

Even as a child he spoke not of flowers but of flower people, and as a young man he explained that alligators were not Satans handiwork, as was sometimes believed, but rather were beautiful expressions of Gods noble intentions. But he failed to find his true personal religion until he

In Yosemite he worshipped effortlessly: since everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars. With trees and boulders as his spiritual colleagues, he said that Yosemite is by far the grandest of all the special temples of nature I was ever permitted to enter. Muirs natural world was suffused with the presence of divinity, so that hares served as his priests and cool mountain streams offered sacramental wine. Embracing yet exceeding the common idea that the natural world provides a beautiful example of Gods handiwork, for Muir nature didnt just point to a deity; nature was the deity. He said: Nature like a fluid seems to drench and steep us throughout, as the whole sky and the rocks and flowers are drenched with spiritual lifewith God. Mountains had spiritual power, the sky had goodness, and the majestic sequoia was a divine King.

Thus always in church, so to speak, Muir also had alpine scripture to read. Finding the divine manuscript of nature to be richer than the many books that he had laboriously memorized from the Bible, Muir spoke to his dear friend Jeanne Carr of glorious lessons of sky and plain and mountain, which no mortal power can ever speak. A comforting lesson came in Bonaventure Cemetery, in Savannah, where John learned from live oak teachers not to fear death. Other lessons involved natures tough love, including a frightening experience in a storm on Brady Glacier in Alaska with his dog pal Stickeen, an experience that led Muir to exclaim that nature gains her ends with dogs as well as with men, making us do as she likes, shoving and pulling us along her ways, however rough, all but killing us at times in getting her lessons driven hard home. Still, for Muir, nature, so replete with

But for Muir it was not enough simply to attend this church of nature or to ponder these bucolic spiritual teachings intellectually. Like many mystics before him, Muir by temperament was driven to experience this sacredness as completely as he could. Exhibiting the classic mystical theme of an experience of holy unity, he said of a moving experience in Yosemite: You cannot feel yourself out-of-doors; plains, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a campfire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape and become part and parcel of nature.