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Show 101, CHAPTER III: THE PATHLESS WAY AND THE RANGE OF LIGHT If there is such a thing as an awakening, Muir's eyes were opened by the mountains in the early seventies. His journals and letters from Yosemite are filled with references to baptism in light and water. Rock, water, and sunlight were instinct with God. In the morning particularly, the mountains were baptized by light, the trees and mountains "made one, unseparate, unclothed, open to the Divine Soul, dissolved in the mysterious incomparable Spirit of holy Light!" So it was that he could speak of the Sierra as "Mountains holy as Sinai." As a wanderer in this wilderness, he too was baptized, made whole, reborn or delivered by the light of the mountains, or so he claimed. He was living in a sacred world, and as he partook of its reality and being, he became a part of a world which was not a chaos, but a cosmos. In this way, he had come to |