#nature john muir

[nobeerreviews]

Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.

-- John Muir

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

[metaphrasis]

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn."

— John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894)

[quietlotus]

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

— John Muir

[auntieblues]

“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” ― John Muir

original auntieblues

[andallshallbewell]

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

" The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness. "

- John Muir

📷 mine

[blackswaneuroparedux]

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

- John Muir

[wayti-blog]

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

– John Muir

[nobeerreviews]

And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.

-- John Muir

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

— John Muir, quoted in Samuel Hall Young‘s Alaska Days with John Muir

[johnschneiderblog]

Stop hiking; start sauntering

We hiked a small section of the 145-mile Sunrise Coast Birding Trail , which starts at the mouth of AuSable River in Oscoda and meanders along the Lake Huron coast, all the way to Mackinaw City

Wait - let me amend that; we didn't actually hike. We sauntered, which, in my opinion, is what people should do when they find themselves surrounded by beauty - natural, or otherwise.

Why rush through it when you can linger in it ...? Nobody hikes through an art museum.

John Muir, the famous naturalist and "Father of the National Parks" was a noted champion of the stroll:

“I don't like either the word (hike) or the thing," he once said. "People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' ... These mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.”

Above, some of the sights along the trail ...

[quietlotus]

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

— John Muir

[maslimanny]

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.!!

[auntieblues]

“How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!” ― John Muir

original auntieblues