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Show 14 she would have chosen had she not been born a woman. She once hoped to emulate David Douglas, the "Patron Saint of Tree Worshippers," who botanized through the forests of western America. Muir, another Scot, could perhaps become the living inheritor of that tradition, as she could not. When Muir set out on his walk through the South looking for "the greatest extent of virgin forest," her hopes went with him. In her notes for an article she wrote about Muir when they were both older, she compared him to the Patron Saint of Ecology, Saint Francis of Assisi. She also described her one wonderful Sierran outing with Muir and his friends in terms of Saint Francis. "We carried no tent that 'our brother the sun' and 'our sisters the moon and the stars' might be always with us." "We were willing to lose ourselves," she said. In fact she was at least partially responsible for creating this kind of courage in Muir himself. When she wrote to him while he was in Yosemite, she reminded him that he was close to the "great mother," and she once commented that one had to capitalize "Valley" for the same reason as one capitalized "Jesus." She had, in other words, a most powerful and liberating effect on Muir and loosed him, as he only slowly realized himself, from the bonds of patriarchal thinking, from seeing Nature only as commodity. She gave him the support he needed if he was to take a solitary path and a loving attention toward Nature. His own conversion to this way of thinking is vividly dramatized by an early Yosemite journal. Muir had recycled a notebook in which he had earlier transcribed notes from reading |