Mystical Lover of Land. John Muir as Storyteller

Feather River Inn

I grew up in the Sammamish river valley in the Cascade mountains. Lying under big red cedars at 6 years old and watching the slant-gold rays of the evening sun sliding down through the huge boughs gave me a sense of profound well-being that I can recall even now. Reading Muir in college I recognized the same gut-heart-soul response to the world that had been growing in me since childhood. My sense is that independent of whatever theological influences that shaped Muir's ideas, his philosophy, about the world, his experience of nature was at a more basic and profound level than ideas, mental perceptions and formulations. Muir's statements in letters to Jeanne Carr written during his first years in Yosemite reveal a being-body/mind/soul-spontaneously kindled by its contact with the world. Muir's recurring images of "baptism" and of nature "flowing into me" are not merely poetic metaphors. Rather, they describe Muir's experience of the world not as an objective reality outside himself, but rather as a transforming, awakening force, a confluence of powers, working a profound and continuous effect on the receptive being itself. In many instances Muir's language resembles descriptions used by Hindu and Buddhist mystics to describe their transformative visionary experiences. Muir's extraordinary imperviousness to cold, lack of food, and physical suffering on many occasions resembles the behavior of Himalayan yogis who claim to live by spiritual energy. Muir many times spoke of being sustained by beauty.