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Show 237. my great and glorious God. While thus engaged, it always seemed natural to me to sing, or chant for my meditations; or, to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice. Here is a kind of archetypal experience, but one which can be had only by an individual who has begun to know that he is saved, or redeemed. The fear disappears when the faith becomes strong. There is, however, a notable difference when we return from Edwards' vision to Muir's. Muir did not choose to fix himself in the landscape. In "Wind Storm," he took up the term saunter, which replaced the word drift he used earlier, to describe his own movement through the landscape. He sauntered through the flow, climbed the tree and waved in the storm; he emphasized his own dynamic approach to Nature, and the element of thought in his walking. Saunter is rooted in Middle English, and means " to muse. " In his Stormy Sermons, he was constantly on the move, and well he might have been. Just as his own life during the seventies, when he refused to settle down, consisted of a kind of cycling through the mountains, from the base of the Sierra to the summits and back down to the city, then up into the mountains again, he recommended such a process to all men. Weak animals that we are, we must be continually reminded of our place in creation, must be cycled through her meditative structure, over and over again. |