Three quotations from John Muir illustrate advanced perception.
After listening to it in all kinds of winds, night and day, season after season, I think I could approximate to my position on the mountain by this pine music alone. If you would catch the tone of separate needles, climb a tree in breezy weather. Every needle is carefully tempered and gives forth no uncertain sound, each standing out with no interference excepting during heavy gales; then you may detect the click of one needle upon another, readily distinguishable from the free wind-like hum.[1]
Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the camp-fire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure-glow not explainable. One’s body then seems homogeneous throughout, sound as a crystal.[2]
Linger here [after hiking from Yosemite Valley up to the head of Nevada Fall] an hour or two, for not only have you glorious views of the wonderful fall, but of its wild, leaping, exulting rapids and greater than all, the stupendous scenery into the heart of which the white passionate river goes wildly thundering, surpassing everything of its kind in the world. After an unmeasured hour or so of this glory, all your body aglow, nerve currents flashing through you never before felt, go to the top of the Liberty Cap, only a glad saunter now that your legs as well as head and heart are awake and rejoicing with everything.[3]
In a comment to the previous post, Dr Perry shared a new frontier in natural beauty.
“Yesterday, Sunday March 10, 2002 about 10:00AM, I went for my usual walk, and I was astounded when I looked up in the sky. There was not a cloud in the sky; but the most thrilling aspect was the deep blue color of the sky. Never have I seen the sky this color of blue. It was so deep, so royal, almost as if it was a painted. This was beauty. I told my wife and my daughter Tiffany about it so they could see it before it faded. They too agreed it was the most beautiful sky they had ever seen.
“I deeply feel that this must be the way the sky is in heaven. The light just seemed to be coming from all over the sky rather than one place.
“This picture of the dark royal blue sky evoked emotions of wonderment, joy, hope, and a deep longing. It even stimulated my faith. It lifted me out of myself. I was able to savor these emotions for several days afterwards before they began to fade.”
Anything to share from your perceptual experience in the beauties of nature?
[1] Muir, The Yosemite (New York: The Century Co., 1914), 105.
[2] John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 174-75.
[3] Muir, The Yosemite, 198.
