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John Muir is best known for his work in preserving the great natural areas of America. What is not commonly known is that he was also a great contemplative thinker - a sort of "wilderness mystic" - one who experienced union with the Divine through contact with the great natural areas of the Western United States. Muir's preservation efforts were motivated in large part by his experience of the spiritual dimension of Nature. It was Muir's earthy mysticism that motivated him to work so diligently for the preservation of wild places, which he viewed as "God's First Temples." This book is a sort of "bible" of Muir quotations related to a vibrant and ecstatic spirituality of Nature. It includes a new selection of never-before published selections from original journals contained in the John Muir Papers, as well as passages from his published works. Anyone interested in experiencing a deeper communion with Nature will find this book invaluable.
Scottish naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) helped spark the modern environmental movement. Living for months and even years in the wilderness, he experienced a deep communion with the sacred and his contemplations on the natural world are filled with mystical intuitions of God's reality. This volume contributes to a strain of spirituality that finds an echo in today's environmental movements.
In the late 1800s, John Muir made several trips to the pristine, relatively unexplored territory of Alaska, irresistibly drawn to its awe-inspiring glaciers and its wild menagerie of bears, bald eagles, wolves, and whales. Half-poet and half-geologist, he recorded his experiences and reflections in "Travels in Alaska," a work he was in the process of completing at the time of his death in 1914. As Edward Hoagland writes in his Introduction, "A century and a quarter later, we are reading ÝMuir's ̈ account because there in the glorious fiords . . . he is at our elbow, nudging us along, prompting us to understand that heaven is on earth--is the Earth--and rapture is the sensible response wherever a clear line of sight remains." This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes photographs from the original 1915 edition.
Here is an entertaining collection of famed conservationist John Muir’s most exciting adventures in nature, representing some of his finest writing. From the famous avalanche ride off the rim of Yosemite Valley to his night spent weathering a windstorm at the top of a tree to death-defying falls on Alaskan glaciers, the renowned outdoorsman’s exploits are related in passages that are by turns exhilarating, unnerving, dizzying, and outrageous.
Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters--Bell Mountain Wilderness with Søren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh--demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings--Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim--but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love. An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.
A controversial, informed, and important look at the protection and management of America's national parks
As the percentage of unaffiliated seekers or Spiritual But Not Religious people or "Nones" increases in America and in the world at large, a sizable number are drawn toward a spirituality of Nature. And while many of these seekers emphasize simply the physical challenge and ignore the theological or philosophical aspect of their relationship to Nature, Wilderness Mysticism seeks to offer a spiritual / theological interpretation for those who want it. In the process, it employs insights and meditation practices gleaned from an ancient tradition - that of Christian Mysticism - and updated in a modern context. Publisher:
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award “Injects much-needed vibrancy into the stuffy world of nature writing.” —Outside, “The Outdoor Books That Shaped the Last Decade” The biologist and author of Sounds Wild and Broken combines elegant writing with scientific expertise to reveal the secret world hidden in a single square meter of old-growth forest In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature's path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life. Each of this book's short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell spins a brilliant web of biology and ecology, explaining the science that binds together the tiniest microbes and the largest mammals and describing the ecosystems that have cycled for thousands- sometimes millions-of years. Each visit to the forest presents a nature story in miniature as Haskell elegantly teases out the intricate relationships that order the creatures and plants that call it home. Written with remarkable grace and empathy, The Forest Unseen is a grand tour of nature in all its profundity. Haskell is a perfect guide into the world that exists beneath our feet and beyond our backyards.
Trail Mix: Wit & Wisdom from the Outdoors is a collection of quotes, poetry, and passages from classic books that provide outdoor inspiration to those in the woods, on the mountain, beside the water, or at home. Featured throughout the book is a pantheon of outdoor lovers, nature writers, and environmental conservationists, including John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, John Wesley Powell, George Perkins Marsh, and many more whose love and respect for the outdoors remains a model for today.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.