✍️ Going out is really going in
The wisdom of John Muir
Hello!
News: You can now order a signed Big Ideas Little Pictures, from my friends at South Kensington Books. I popped in to sign them last week.
A different kind of sketch this week:
John Muir is one of my heroes. A Scotsman who moved to California, and through his writings and public engagement (in his later years), played a direct role in America's Greatest Idea: the creation of the National Park system.
He wrote prodigiously and is very quotable. The National Park Service has a lovely page of inspiring John Muir quotes, as does the Sierra Club he founded, with sources.
But most of all, he spent long days and years by himself exploring the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and taking in everything that Nature offered.
Drawn from his later writings and published in John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938, is this wonderful quote:
"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
— John Muir
I'm sure people draw their own value from this quote. But for me, it reminds me that we are part of Nature and belong outside, not inside.
Is there some out that you can make your in this week?
Jono
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An eye-opening and readable view into John Muir's writings is his book My First Summer in the Sierra, about the year he spent driving sheep up into the mountains and living alongside them. It gives an early taste of his poetic writing, the wild life he embraced, complete with remarkable stories, and the raptures the mountains produced in him.
The backdrop is from Upper Grove in Mariposa, Yosemite.
Related Ideas to Going Out was Really Going In
Also see:
Brilliant. The explorer Ray Mears, I think it was, did a series of episodes on John Muir and the national parks the sprung up as a result of his writings and wanderings.