Chris Highland - Meditations of John Muir: Natures Temple

as far as I can I must drift about these love-monument
mountains, glad to be a servant of servants
in so holy a wilderness.

O n a recent return trip from Scotland, the land of John Muirs birth, I met a young couple from Glasgow who had never heard of their fellow countryman. As they flew into California for the first time, and newlyweds at that, I told them of Muirs Scottish spirit alive in Muir Woods, Martinez, and Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite national parks. The more I told them of the natural delights enjoyed by Muir, the more thrilled they were to begin their adventure. Fresh from my own pilgrimage to Muirs birthplace in Dunbar, I felt a renewed kinship with the man who said, I care to live only to entice people to look at Natures loveliness.

John Muir (1838-1914) made enticement a spiritual quality. His enthusiastic preaching of the natural world sprang directly from his joyful immersion in the soul of it all. In my journal from that second journey across the sea I wrote, The thought is constantgo to the church of Nature. Let the tired and worn out go. Go! Drop it and Go! Go to the beauty of life that is free and open to everyone. Go and just be there in it, as a part of it. Fly with the geese, thunder with the falls of the Clyde [river], scootch up the castle ruins, graze with the woolly sheep Breathe Life deeply. Live!

This is the effect Muir can have on you if you are not careful! You venture out into the wilds where you have to depend on your intuition, on Natures way, on your deeper sense of belonging. What some call faith or spirituality is that risking, that longing and belonging. Muir knew it, felt it, lived it.

As a patriarch of the American environmental movement, Muir engendered many conservation and ecological families. He helped to give birth to the national park system, the Sierra Club, and a myriad of smaller groups devoted to saving rivers, redwoods, and wildlife. Yet, he is also a spiritual parent who leads us down unmarked trails of the spirit. By urging us to simply be present in the world around us, loving and honoring it as our garden home, his poetic insight liberates life.

Every spiritual lesson we need is subtly and spectacularly evident in Nature. I have gleaned this insight from years of hiking the worlds wisdom traditions. But mostly I have learned it in Muirs teeming forest. He teaches that we can step out beyond the books, the traditions, the philosophies that restrict the free rivering of our minds and dam the creativity of our communities; we may follow our streams into forests yet to be found. To climb with Muir is to reach remarkable vistas where we can see the smallest and the grandest as one forestas one interwoven whole. At the end of each trail is a celebration of this organic unity, a bow and a dance of reverence and joy.

The readings in this book represent only a small portion of Muirs thought. To call them meditations is a bit presumptuous. Yet I believe he would be pleased and honored to know that readers turn to his scribblings for inspiration and guidance, not merely to study them for their historical, scientific, or tourist data. He would find what he called inexpressible delight in the companionship of the spiritual teachers, poets, and philosophers who join him on these pages. To us all he says there are higher lands of the mind, of the heart.

Invite Muir to help you jump the boulders into yourself. Allow him to guide your way like an expert tracker to what Thoreau called the Art of God, what Gautama Buddha called Awakening, and Jesus called the Home of God. His words can point you to what the Hindu peoples have called Atman, Jews address as Adonai, Emerson termed the Oversoul, and Muslims worship as Allah.

Let John Muir lead you along the ultimate adventure that treks every range of light. Then venture off on your own deertrails of the heart, harkening to his granite gospel that calls for you to get as near to the heart of the world as you can. Going out or going in, the cathedral doors are wide open!

Chris Highland,

Summer 2001

Go now and then for fresh life
if most of humanity must go through this
town stage of development
just as divers hold their breath and come ever and anon
to the surface to breathe.
Go whether or not you have faith.
Form parties, if you must be social,
to go to the snow-flowers in winter,
to the sun-flowers in summer.
Anyway, go up and away for life;
be fleet!

Whose homeland was Scotland and Who died homeless in America