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Show 95. glaciers themselves was a search for an imaginative fusion of self with other agents of Nature. If such a fusion could be an annihilation of self, it could also suggest a rebirth. Muir did not expect God to save him, nor was he unaware of the possibility of death in the wilderness. Apparently he even had dreams in which he saw himself swept away by an avalanche or thrown down a cliff in an earthquake. Even in his dreams he learned to die calmly, as the glaciers had. When he contemplated the risks he took, he justified himself by remembering that he had been visiting sacred places. Thoreau had said of the mountain tops that "only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. Simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains - their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them." But Thoreau was wrong. Certain men in all times and all cultures have gone to sacred and mysterious places, because that was where one could gain power. Shamans climbed their own kinds of mastheads at the beginning of celestial journeys. And in many rites of sacred initiation, men have gone through death and rebirth. Indeed Muir was reborn as a son of Mother Nature when he returned from the glacial womb. He had acquired a deeper appreciation of his own relationship to the wilderness by living with the agents which shaped it and are still shaping it. He learned to see not as a man but as a glacier might. And he could now answer men like Clarence King, who thought that the Sierra was "the ruins of a bygone geological empire." He had been reborn with a cosmic point of view, which he |