![]() Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go for the mountains are fountains - beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken. ![]() One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. ![]() When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. ![]() Recounting the epiphany he had while hiking Yosemite’s Cathedral Peak for the first time in the summer of his thirtieth year - an epiphany strikingly similar to the one Virginia Woolf had at the moment she understood what it means to be an artist - Muir writes: ![]() “The fact that we are connected through space and time,” evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis observed of the interconnectedness of the universe, “shows that life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.”Ī century before Feynman and Margulis, the great Scottish-American naturalist and pioneering environmental philosopher John Muir (April 21, 1838–December 24, 1914) channeled this elemental fact of existence with uncommon poetic might in John Muir: Nature Writings ( public library) - a timeless treasure I revisited in composing The Universe in Verse. “I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe,” the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his lovely prose poem about the wonder of life. ![]()
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