Happy 100 Years!

“Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”

~ John Muir ~

to celebrate 100 years of the national parks in the USA, it seems ever so fitting to have the father and poet laureate of these temples weigh in  on a beautiful way to pilgrimage into peace, for, by exploring the great outdoors, we spiral indoors into our own true nature and simultaneously see the beauty all around…

i’m celebrating today with an inner pilgrimage back to one of my favorite parks (how i’d love to visit all 59!) and re-membering the first sighting, the falling in love, the feeling of coming home to a place that lives always in me… and hearing the sound of flowing water wherever i am in this garden home with beauty abounding from wherever one stands in this expansive space and stories pouring forth from the ancestors going back to the great silence and into the beyond… gratitude flows spontaneously for the waterfalls and bird songs and wind… for all the four leggeds calling this true refuge home and the sun and moon and stars and the sky that goes on forever and ever like great mystery, our eternal home…

     may we all keep close to true nature within and without, above and below                    sacred space of illumination, place of our one heart’s radiant glow…

enjoy, in joy, a walk in the wilds…