It is Still the Morning of Creation…
Soon I shall return to my own travel writing. I thought I would write an interlude of sorts, meant to transition from previous wanderings toward more of my recent adventure. Slowly, I have been digesting a book written by conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir. Travels in Alaska details his journeys between 1879 and 1899 to the Alaskan wilderness, through its forests, mountains and glaciers. Every so often he writes of God an the beauty that surrounds him, uncovering a spirituality of nature…
Gazing at a mighty glacier, he saw this awesome sight as reflecting the plans of God, and wrote (pp. 67-68):
Standing here, with facts so fresh and telling and held up so vividly before us, every seeing observer, not to say geologist, must readily apprehend the earth-sculpturing, landscape-making, action of flowing ice. And here, too, one learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes; that moraine soil is being ground and outspread for coming plants,—coarse boulders and gravel for forests, finer soil for grasses and flowers,—while the finest part of the grist, seen hastening out to sea in the draining streams, is being stored away in darkness and builded particle on particle, cememting and crystalizing, to make the mountains and valleys and pains of other predestined landscapes, to be followed by still others in endless rhythm and beauty.
Amen!
Tags: Alaska, glacier, John Muir, nature, quote, spirituality
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